Hi Joshua,
Thanks for trying out the Beta. I tried to reproduce the issue you’re seeing here by creating a cluster with 2 buckets in the Cluster Spec and they were both created as expected on cluster creation. Could you also share the bucket section of your spec? (Make sure the bucket names are unique)
As for bucket deletion, yes the operator does ‘undo’ any manual changes made by users in order to maintain consistency with the cluster spec. There is an option to pause the operator if you did not want this reconciliation to occur, but sounds like you were resorting to manual changes because the original issue (1) wasn’t working.