Thanks for being inspired by us and for helping to make the CE/EE convention more popular. I have no doubt you'll continue to ship many new features as part of CE.
Do you have some sort of notification on Gitlab mentions in HN comments? :)
For the record, I'm at least opsish so it didn't bother me too much directly either. But it did explain my confusion at most of this thread, so I figured I'd offer the thought. Free idea, worth exactly what you paid ;)
In any case, in the end actions speak louder than words. If we consistently ship solid, open code that actually solves problem, and no frankenstein crippleware materializes... Then we will gradually earn the trust of more and more people.
FWIW, we took some of our inspiration from the original RHEL/Fedora fork by Red Hat in the early 2000s. And more recently from the Gitlab CE/EE product positioning.