Still early days, but I disagree with some of your assertions. Seems to be a bit of an echo chamber in osh these days...

The effort was not created in vacuum.

-The skywater effort sits on top of darpa's openroad (I am currently on the board and so is serge)

-Prof Gaillardon and Xifan created the "openfpga" open source generator and taped out a skywater and 12nm (see woset best paper) [edit: and they are the founders of osfpga]

-Vaughn Betz created VTR which symbiflow is based on.[edit: and he is on the board]

-Yosys/Claire has done amazing work but it was possble thanks to Alan Mishchenko's ABC. De Michelli and Gaillardon have similar package to ABC that is definitely worth a look.

-The fees seem to be in line with other organizations, chips alliance, riscv foundation, etc.