Pachyderm makes different tradeoffs and we're excited to see their launch. Seriously congrats to you all! This is an invigorating space to say the least ;).
We do have a few philosophical differences though. The biggest being that we're opposed requiring data-scientists to including tracking code to trace their results. Every company we've seen use systems like that winds up with different levels of instrumentation on different pipelines and a lot of experiments with no instrumentation. It makes it hard to answer questions like "what are all the places this data is being used?" conclusively, because there's always this "dark matter" of code that hasn't been instrumented that your code doesn't see. We prefer a system that automatically tracks things without asking the user to do anything so that information is always collected and there when you need it. That being said, I'm not sure how you could do the type of finegrained model tracking you guys do automatically. We can track lineage automatically because we're the system that stores and exposes the data, so we know when it's being accessed.
This will always be an issue if you’re an early adopter. The three mitigating calculations every case are: 1 - somebody* will probably be the “winner”, and could be it. 2 - between now and 3 years from now will you get enough value that it will be worth migrating to the eventual winner rather than doing without and 3 - three years from now you can just start new projects on the winning tech; most or all of the current projects will have withered and/or died anyway.
Finally, I think the survival of tools will come down to being able to compete on the price with leading cloud vendors.
Just like the choice of programming languages the decision would get down to your team's past experience and cost of ownership.