Google code did not at all suck, compared to the alternatives - essentially just SourceForge! - at the time it launched. A lot of what the OP wrote rings true

Google code did not at all suck, compared to the alternatives - essentially just SourceForge! - at the time it launched. A lot of what the OP wrote rings true to me, Github obviously hit on a better model, but they clearly had different goals. I'm sympathetic to people who came into this landscape after Github was already around feeling like google code was a lame also-ran, but as someone who thought "why is everything hosted through this shitty SourceForge website" when I first started using open source, it was a huge improvement.