But I agree with you, it's biggest weakness is that for a real long time the tagline of it was "there are many harnesses, this one is MINE" (That being Mario's)
I have a lot of respect for Mario and his team, but there's things like you've pointed out that deviate from standards, and other issues that I've seen get posted, only to get knocked down by the team as WON'T FIX because, even though the new owners changed the tagline from MINE to YOURS... It's still very much Mario's.
I do like opinionated things. Truly. But I'm also of the opinion that standards exist for a reason.
That said. I like Pi so much that it's my daily driver, and I've created an ecosystem of plugins to do everything I want, having them all tie together and communicate through the shared bus. Pi is really a good harness.
It's just, well. I don't agree with some of the opinions.
If I'm going to add another thing here... Whilst you cannot get everything you need from the openAI API spec, you can get a surprising amount to get a model config. That said. Versions of Pi are still shipping with model configs for certain inference providers. I do hope that gets decoupled at some stage. I see the groundwork being laid.
So the work is being done in the right direction. I applaud the team but I do get the feeling that a lot of this is because people want to contribute, but the team really wants to hand craft this. And that's great