1. Nearly all features feel like they are half-baked. I do not even know where to start my enumeration of things that can be improved. The worst is maybe the search, followed by the wiki, followed by the issues.
2. It is more important for them to add more features then to improve existing features.
I think this is a direct consequence of the company politics as stated in the article. People may like working there and see it as gold standard. But from my point of view (as a paying customer) I’d like to see more people there work more on consolidation and refinement. Of course engineers prefer working on the cool new stuff. If there is no one who forces the focus on improving existing stuff, nothing gets better over time. At our company we have the same sickness, I wonder what others are doing differently that they don’t have the same problem. E.g. Apple.
On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to gitlab. Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?