I understand your frustrations with AWS, and I get that solutions for enterprises don't always work for smaller companies, but when someone describes a solution that reduces operational complexity while increasing security, they should get thanks. It's not their fault that AWS has too many services.
I think this is very important and generally poorly understood:
Scaling problems exist both up and down.
In exactly the same way there are solutions that work well in the small but become disproportionately expensive when you scale them up, there are solutions that are cost-effective on a large scale that become prohibitively expensive on a smaller scale.
The latter category includes a large chunk of enterprise-y cloud solutions.
