Revision history is the only fig leaf here though about wp-engine being "bastardized wordpress" ?

I suppose I understand the argument about wp-engine using significant wordpress.org resources has some merit (but is entirely unrelated to the bastardization argument) if wp-engine is just fetching things like wordpress updates and plugin lists and plugin updates, etc, all directly from wordpress.org servers on a per-blog basis but I find it hard to believe that wp-engine doesn't cache or have their own layer for that.