Is this not a fact, versus a mere argument?
Do you think the decision is not based on merit? b/c there's all the effective distros switching, versus you saying nothing is broken - one of you must be wrong?
Maybe the Linux ecosystem is broken, you just can't say it because you've already adjusted you expectations, or solidified your use case(s)?
Honestly the whole thing made me more or less give up on open-source as a development model. Good programmers are expensive, especially if you want them to do the boring maintenance work, and that funding has to come from somewhere. The "give the program away for free and sell consulting" business model works up to a point, but it distorts maintainers' interests away from what would actually benefit the majority of users. While I do blame RedHat, the real problem is that no-one except RedHat is paying people to work full-time on GNOME or any of dozens of similarly important projects (KDE seems to be mostly funded by the EU, which is a much healthier model, but I don't know if you could make a whole distribution from projects like that).
Having been born during 70's I also saw all those ideals turn into business people the following decade.
It is easy to be idealistic when others put in the money.