We build a complete drop in replacement for Confluent's metrics/management tooling (https://kpow.io) that fills a very large gap in the engineering experience for Kafka. I say replacement but tbh we offer a lot more in terms of features other than stopping/starting clusters.

It feels obvious to me that AWS will roll-out S3 backed storage and managed Kafka Connect at some point, their recent IAM / ACL integration points to a pretty active MSK team.

I completely agree in the past there were some pretty big gaps - that's why we built kPow - my feeling is those gaps are narrowing pretty significantly.