I don’t think it’s design by committee so much as it is sales needing more ammunition to close deals. That has for my whole career been the primary motivation of almost all features outside of the “base product.”

“Hey we got $so_many million dollar client who wants to use our product but they want to auth with their AD and can’t use our three other SSO options.”

And thus was born the company’s pluggable directory over VPN connector and auth strategy.