Sadly, it would probably be as hard to maintain as an opensource version. We really want to have access to the code to make sure we can fix, troubleshoot it, understand it fast...

Things that may've help:

-- Configuration definition (e.g. protobufs.)

-- More focus on observability: error metrics (instead of logs), tracing, etc.

-- gRPC control plane.

-- C++ module development SDK.

-- (ideally) bazel.

Some dataplane features like gRPC JSON transcoding, gRPC-Web, and http/2 to backends.