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Is there any talks by AWS engineers why they went with a fork and not say a white box implementation of CitusDB or just use EnterpriseDB or just make it a vanilla Postgres with some more performant defaults??

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AWS acquired the underlying tech for Redshift from ParAccel. The former ParAccel CTO is actually on our team.

I wrote a long answer on Quora on that topic:

https://www.quora.com/Amazon-redshift-uses-Actians-ParaAccel...

Redshift is a massively parallel processing columnar storage database. The storage engine is completely different. Redshift is a derivative of ParAccel which was itself forked from Postgres and heavily modified. I assume AWS purchased it because it does things CitusDB and EnterpriseDB don’t do. The intended workloads are completely different.

Ahh. Consider me learned.

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