I’d guess this was a consequence of a strategy decision that went against the plan (probably an expectation mismatch with users). I think the large part of the problem is the public GitLab instance is (was?) the beta environment, so a lot of issues popped up constantly while people were evaluating the options. In our group we are all volunteers, so when downtime impacts the little time we can dedicate (push code, review, deploy) it’s a fairly big deal.
Our python group (pyslackers.com) runs in the open as much as we can, so for us we went where the exposure and ease to be involved is (Github), even though from a raw feature perspective we liked what we had on GitLab when it worked.
Before I worked here, I was on a team that evaluated different devops tools, and I felt the same apprehension about the uptime. But we eventually chose gitlab, and the only real downtime we experienced was during the 2017 outage. And we liked having the option to switch to self-hosted if it became too much of an issue
The project boards are better than most others, the CI is phenomenal, and I have noticed the review process is being worked on.
Keep up the good work, we need options in the space!