I've had the exact opposite experience, and the experience you speak of is the one I had with Microsoft Azure PaaS.
The only discontinued runtime was Python 2.5, and admittedly because of the lack of threading support it's cost went due to the way billing was changed. Upgrading to Python 2.7 was a piece of cake, and enabling thread safety returned the expense to reasonable levels.
App Engine was built for massive scaling, and anything like that is going to have tradeoffs and idiosyncracies. There's always going to be tuning and optimisations. As long as my sysadmin is kept to a minimum, I don't care. I'll leave Google to deal with outages and scaling, since they are an order of magnitude better at it than I am.
If you want exorbitant pricing with a good dose of headfuckery, deploy to Heroku.
The only discontinued runtime was Python 2.5, and admittedly because of the lack of threading support it's cost went due to the way billing was changed. Upgrading to Python 2.7 was a piece of cake, and enabling thread safety returned the expense to reasonable levels.
App Engine was built for massive scaling, and anything like that is going to have tradeoffs and idiosyncracies. There's always going to be tuning and optimisations. As long as my sysadmin is kept to a minimum, I don't care. I'll leave Google to deal with outages and scaling, since they are an order of magnitude better at it than I am.
If you want exorbitant pricing with a good dose of headfuckery, deploy to Heroku.