An OSS project isn't really supposed to be about "I can freeload on the works of others for some investment in comprehension and customization", which is how I felt the author framed his situation at times.
The underlying failure seems to be that the author decided it was easier to maintain his own proprietary platform than modify OpenStack for their needs and contributing back to the community. This would lead to others to pick up their stuff down the road and potentially reducing the maintenance burden (at the expense of exposing any secret sauce you feel you might have).
This deeper failure is In the incentives for Rackspace to withhold key commits on Ironic from the community because they feel it is secret sauce. (I am taking the OP's version of the tale at face value). They're one of the flagship supporters of OpenStack, and their behavior is perceptably a big reason for its failures to date.
The limitations of Neurtron without a product like VMware NSX underneath are well known. Production grade virtual networking at scale is hard and also mostly a secret sauce (for now).
OpenStack seems to effectively have become the OMG and CORBA 1.0 with a reference implementation - it's cloud vendor kabuki instead of distributed objects square dancing. You need vendor help to get going, and the portability is very limited, you'll get some value out of what's been done but at great effort. It seems to also be a useful commons for network and storage vendors to help drive interperability with the side modules (Cinder and Neutron). If anything, OpenStack is how the industry is desperately brute-force learning what Amazon Web Services has accomplished before they swallow the universe, which is valuable but messy.
OpenStack seems the only "I want to run a general purpose cloud" game in town today - CloudStack exists but doesn't seem to have a lot of momentum. Google, Azure and Digital Ocean are the only competitors to AWS of note and they don't open source their stuff. CoreOS on PXE or Ubuntu MaaS might work but needs a much more mature cluster schedulers, network and volume management. Or perhaps the real next generation will be "none of the above".