But there were definitely some scope issues and other stuff that could have been handled better. It's hard to keep up with GitHub now that they're pretty aggressive about features, etc. But the core competencies have always been very good in my opinion, and it has a nice, hackable codebase.
To be fair, the review system was better than GitHub. It's insane that even today, there's no way to tag your team and have them stay tagged. If anybody comments or reviews, they're dismissed. This is an issue that's been open for nearly five years. [1]
Of course, if you compare to Jira's ticket-management experience, and nowaday's github code review, sure, it's quite jank. But for a brief moment, in a period of time at work, Phabricator really shined!
My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback.
I hope Gitea is accepted!