I switched from opengl b/c I was tired of staring at a black screen with no debugging information (sure...glGetError) when I tried to implement a non-trivial feature. After tons of work to learn vulkan and getting it up and running, I still think it was worth it.

Agreed. I don’t even need all these fancy Vulkan features most of the time… Just validation layers and RenderDoc debugging make the whole experience of doing graphics programming so much more pleasant for me, compared to what I had to deal with in OpenGL.