I think you may have missed that they do indeed let you sort of self host, in that you can run it on your own AWS resources. They just need access to manage it

I think you may have missed that they do indeed let you sort of self host, in that you can run it on your own AWS resources. They just need access to manage it for you. Which I'd think would cover most orgs requirements out there that would actually use gitpod, but I could be wrong. I think in this particular case it's maybe not quite as easy as just shipping a container or whatever, because a huge amount of the value and effort is actually the orchestration of VMs/containers/however they do it under the hood. Again, I might just not know enough here, but it seems more like they've constrained their self hosted option a bit to keep it manageable rather than getting rid of it in practice. It also seems like you could just use the agpl licensed open source code if you want? Finally, it seems unfair to characterize them as having a weak engineering culture when they've managed to create something rather impressive with, I think(?), quite a small team.