> stable, version-controllable, and intuitive to use

Neither of those features are inherently impossible to do with GUIs. Alternatively, you can have a GUI editing your text based configuration.

Although, doesn't look as cool so, here we are.

There are quite a few GUI tools for k8s.

Currently mainstream k8s is text based, because it's still too fast moving and new. Creating a great GUI would be a serious overhead and there's not enough interest/demand for it. It'll come eventually.

Rancher does a lot of the orchestrating of k8s clusters and works well in my experience.

Rancher is even more approachable and streamlined than Openshift. Yeah we need k8s to be more streamlined. It's fragmented cluster-something right now. There is no pride in making systems more complex nor there is pride in knowing how to operate them.

OpenShift's web interface lets you do a lot (other alternatives are of course available). And it's quite nice being able to edit the YAML of everything via the web interface as well!