Those lower layers are a significant anti-feature for a customer needing quick, effective support, and it is only occasionally/rarely the case that a key author

Those lower layers are a significant anti-feature for a customer needing quick, effective support, and it is only occasionally/rarely the case that a key author or maintainer is actually employed by Red Hat. Most things delivered by Red Hat were not written by Red Hat and where they are, that delivery tends to be a rewritten, renamed project which went from community-driven (FOSS made to serve the user) into a corporate-driven model (gate-kept software which serves primarily as a profitable subscription-dependant product). The trade-off is effectively for legal liability transference more than for genuine supportability. I would rather get eventual real support from the bazaar of people who wrote a thing (knowing, intimately and technically why) than liability-waving support (assuming successful escalation) from those who rewrote it in the cathedral with divergence intentionally created for corporate control and profit.