I'd be curious to know how this directly impacted Gaia development. It's a tool I rely on essentially every day in some pretty harsh environments so I second this concern.
No one is gate-keeping these taxpayer-funded resources, which is sortof what you're implying here. It costs money to process, host, and deliver these taxpayer -funded maps to people, especially offline.
If you're a legacy user of Gaia, I'd encourage you to give the app another shot. Originally Gaia was the best way to view USGS quads on your phone. Since then, we've invested a ton of resources and engineering into building a vector topographic map based in OpenStreetMap, which I think is a huge value add for backcountry users.
We give that away for free.
But if all you're looking for is USGS topos, I'd use Avenza.
The subscription model has distorted the smartphone map app ecosystem, just like it has the rest of the software industry.
For the record, OSM maps lack the detail and reliability of the legacy USGS 7.5 minute topographic quads. For that matter, the most recent USGS topographic maps are themselves almost as bad as OSM! For best coverage I would recommend the 1990s series or earlier. ( https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-do-us-topo-maps-differ-histori... )
For Android, OSMAnd is good enough for navigation and Qfield can load any GIS vector or raster layer from a desktop QGIS project.
w.r.t the acquisition, we've seen some fairly dramatic highs and lows. The 20% layoff earlier this year was definitely the lowest low, but the whole org was affected, not just Gaia. On the flip side, we've been working really hard on developing a roadmap that centers on stabilising and enhancing the bedrock features that our users have come to expect, and that are sometimes less than perfect. This is something that Outside PM's have been really pushing on. I'm enthusiastic about that focus, because it's been sorely needed.
The tl;dr is that the forces that have caused some of the user experience challenges of late were in play long before the Outside acqusition, and if anything Outside is providing the resources necessary for us to commit to fixing them.