I read, they don't merge PRs for Intel or AMD hardware, so it seems to be generally a bit of a shady project.

Could you expand on this, is there any disadvantage to continuing with ollama?

I use Ollama for prototyping and then move what I can to a vLLM set up

I think if you find Ollama useful, use it regardless of others say. I did give it a try, but found it lands in a weird place of "Meant for developers, marketed to non-developers", where llama.cpp sits on one extreme, and apps like LM Studio sits on the other extreme, Ollama landing somewhere in the middle.

I think the main point that turned me off was how they have their custom way of storing weights/metadata on disk, which makes it too complicated to share models between applications, I much prefer to be able to use the same weights across all applications I use, as some of them end up being like 50GB.

I ended up using llama.cpp directly (since I am a developer) for prototyping and recommending LM Studio for people who want to run local models but aren't developers.

But again, if you find Ollama useful, I don't think there is any reasons for dropping it immediately.

Just use Llamacpp directly

Yeah, I made the same argument but they seem convinced it's better to just provide their own naming instead of separating the two. Maybe marketing gets a bit easier when people believe them to be the same?

    ollama has their own way of releasing their models. 
    when you download r1 you get 7b. 
    this is due to not everyone is able to run 671b. 
    if its missleading then more likely due to user not reading.  

I'm not super convinced by their argument to blame users for not reading, but after all it is their project so.

If nothing is specified the rule of least surprise would be the full vanilla version I would say.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it's deliberate sabotage of a Chinese model.

No, those checkpoints have also been provided by DeepSeek.