The learning curve (or "abundance of almost-what-I-needed documentation") is probably the biggest obstacle to getting into CDK, which is why I put together https://github.com/therightstuff/aws-cdk-js-dev-guide - I wonder if your team would find this helpful?

I find it difficult to wrap my head around the fact that CDK and SAM are incompatible by design, I think they both have useful features that could have worked together quite nicely.