The squash functionality is likely to stay EE only since it is similar to rebasing. Rebasing is EE only because larger enterprises are more likely to have this workflow.
Regarding the 'test the merge' functionality I've only heard requests from large organizations for that, can you detail the context in which you want to use it?
The code analytics is a typical enterprise feature in my view.
I think that the private/confidential issues in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3678 is something that are needed for really large organizations and for people hosting on GitLab.com, so in my view it can be EE only.
For all of the above I try to keep an open mind, so feel free to push back. Based on discussions here we do decide to merge features into CE, for example the branded homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690
'Test the merge' is something that we already get from GitHub. Travis CI tests both the merge and the branch itself. I think it only makes sense to test both, in fact, if I were to choose one way for a Merge Request, I would just test the merge result.
We have IoT Platform SDKs (See https://github.com/IOT-DSA/sdk-dslink-dart and https://github.com/IOT-DSA/sdk-dslink-java for examples) that at somepoint I would like to pitch the idea to move from GitHub to GitLab fully. We currently utilize GitLab for only a portion of our projects. We find it really helpful that Travis CI tests both the merge result and the branch, and even though I could look over it to switch GitLab (because let's face it, GitLab > GitHub), I would love to be able to tell the other developers that they will only be gaining functionality.
As for the code analytics, I have second guessed myself, and I completely agree with you now. This is definitely something that I see most useful in the enterprise setting.
There are a couple of ways to implement this feature and we're discussing them in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 Feel free to join the conversation and/or contribute it. For now this feature is planned for 8.7 but this might change.
See https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/pull-requests#How-Pull-Reque... and http://cl.ly/3L303u2j072x/Image%202016-02-13%20at%207.17.57%... for how Travis CI checks both.
There might be some confirmation bias here going on. In my experience, a lot of enterprise clients I've worked with are using Gitlab. I'm yet to see one major open source project on Gitlab, apart from gitlab itself.
The following features are most concerning:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/150 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 (This one I am not as much concerned about, it's very complicated it seems, I can understand a bit why this would be EE)