Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin

It's weird how I've worked in Large-scale Enterprise shops for more than the last decade, and ESX since about 4 has required absolutely no break-fix other than patching and whatever the underlying hardware needed. We're talking thousands of VMs, and flawless metro-vmotion of hundreds of hot-and-running streaming VMs at times, and over years. To see what you've written, it could be a very different product from the one I've used, as I've seen none of what you mention.

I hope you can see the same reliability one day, from the product where you've migrated.