but our experience so far has been a big improvement over the complexity of managing package dependencies across even just a handful of distros

Do you have some charts or docs that show this complexity problem, because I have problems understanding it. This is very likely due to that my understanding of ceph internals is limited. For instance my view of the osd daemon. Now working with logical volumes for writing/reading data and then you have osd<->osd,mon,mgr communication. What dependency hell is there to be expected?

(Podman has been the only real culprit here, tbh, but I give them a partial pass as the tool is relatively new.)

Is it not better for the sake of stability, security and future support to choose something with a proven record?