> 3. A popular enough feature to possibly gate the entire calculus for users to switch services.
I'd say GitLab's CI/CD system is a lot more useful of a feature. At the very least you can use the actual git blame or another git UI as a workaround. Good luck setting up a replacement CI/CD system.
> 4. Obviously useful feature, as evidenced by the gitlab triage engineer being convinced to add an issue with a single paragraph plea.
That's not how triage works. Just because a bug is filed doesn't mean it's "obviously useful". If the employee had immediately given it a high importance, a release date, and assigned it to somebody, that'd be a different story.
> 5. Gitlab is seemingly unaware of this publicly available information, to the trivially rectified detriment of their own bottom line.
Well, since there is another bug already filed for this feature more than six months ago, [0] I'd say they are quite aware, they just don't consider it as important as you do. The particular person that replied to you just didn't know about it (not surprising when they have more than 10k bugs open).