certainly I love the idea of concourse as a release engineer but the lack of a nice UI for dev feedback/monitoring makes it a hard sell as a drop-in jenkins replacement
So, there is a resource that will fetch your pull requests so that they can be built. It's not quite as good as per-branch builds, but with GitHub's new draft pull request feature (if you use GitHub), it does the trick for us, but we're also a relatively small dev team.
Either way, it's not a drop-in Jenkins replacement. It really does have a high learning curve because it forces you to wrap your mind and your code to Concourse's model. Probably, a lot of your build and deployment scripts would need to be rewritten. The reason why you would do so is to get the benefits described above - everything (including environments) is version controlled, ops are stateless, running code in the CI environment from a developer machine, etc.
certainly I love the idea of concourse as a release engineer but the lack of a nice UI for dev feedback/monitoring makes it a hard sell as a drop-in jenkins replacement