I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy.

Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a subscription model with support directly from experienced distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all important features and workflows can be implemented.

Of course this would've needed to be a public bidding but if Red Hat gets it or SUSE does not really matter and surely is much cheaper than Microsoft licenses.