I was an early adopter of .net core. It definitely had its quirks in the beginning. Recently I gave it another go, it's really improved a lot. Like it's production ready now. I'd say pick it up again.
I remember all of the KRE, KVM, project.json, etc. It was pretty rough, and that's from someone that's been using .net daily since the 1.0 beta many years ago.
