I had a case where using the "for free" academic HPC cluster was so inconvenient that we used only in very few cases when we needed very large amounts of comput

I had a case where using the "for free" academic HPC cluster was so inconvenient that we used only in very few cases when we needed very large amounts of compute, and for any smaller tasks using the commercial cloud solutions saved enough time/salaries so that they were worthwhile even purely from cost perspective. Also, for academic purposes it was possible to get quite large amounts of cloud computing for free, so most users never bothered to even try to approach the academic HPC environment as it had no advantages whatsoever.