I can assure you that openshift will always be Kube++. It's just a Kube distro. The fact that today you need to compile in those extensions is a detail that we and others spend most of the time addressing.

Odds are, most of the things you use in Kubernetes were because someone working on OpenShift wrote, tested, performance tested, and stress tested in production.

When LTS OpenShift is a thing, there will still be an OpenShift trucking along right behind the latest Kube. We always try to strike the balance between being on the bleeding edge and making sure end user clusters continue to work. In fact, a lot of the bugs in patch releases are found by the teams working on openshift and opened upstream right away. But an OpenShift user never sees that, because we only ship once it's stable.