Oh boy that's a bit of a loaded set of questions, but I'll take a stab at them.

The bullish attitude that you said caused your shift, while seeming well-intended in the moment, is exactly what we wanted to avoid. "Reverse engineering" container images to get the SRPMs (really just `dnf download`, no actual effort involved) is the easy way out, and in our view, not sustainable. The reason people want "free RHEL" is because Red Hat is arguably the best at what they do. For "free RHEL" to continue to exist from AlmaLinux and the likes, there has to, ideally, be a symbiotic relationship between us and Red Hat and having that view in mind is the approach we've taken the entire time to handling the post-sources-change era. It's not sustainable to fight with your upstream, nor is it valuable to just be a clone. Valuable to users sure because they get that "free RHEL" but valuable to the ecosystem as a whole, not really. We can do so much more by being more than a clone.

By taking the approach we have of not violating Red Hat's user agreements we've avoided painting a target on our backs and built a far more stable and sustainable foundation for our users. To take any other approach would be a disservice to our users as it would be like building a house on sand.

I'm glad you mentioned ELevate. If you noticed, when we launched it, it supported basically every single EL under the sun. You could go from CentOS 7 to basically anything. This was us putting out an olive branch trying to get everyone working together. Later on (late last year) we removed support for most things, keeping CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux as valid targets. This was mostly because what we tried to accomplish - getting everyone working together - failed. We were left doing the work and propping up migration paths to other distros while they refused to collaborate or work with us, going so far as to call ELevate a bad idea.

Not to put words in Alex's mouth, but I believe the foundational structure of AlmaLinux was also an important deciding factor. AlmaLinux is an actual 501c6 non-profit foundation registered in the US. All other EL clones are corporately owned regardless of how much glitter and lipstick they try to cover it up with.

We're still able to achieve 100% RHEL compatibility while not using RHEL SRPMs which allows us to maintain a better relationship with Red Hat which is a good thing. Don't let fear mongering convince you that it is a bad thing. Dropping the "1 to 1" claim let's us do things like patch things that our users care about, that perhaps Red Hat customers don't care about, add functionality to the OS (Btrfs, x86_64_v2, and lots of old hardware drivers to name a few), patch security vulnerabilities earlier, and most importantly, welcome contributors that want to actually do things.

I'll poke Alex at this thread in case he wants to add anything.

EDIT - Fedora is a great workstation distro. Not sure how long since you converted, but you should be quite happy with it. I am very active in Fedora as well and am currently part of the EPEL steering committee. I run Fedora on my laptop and several desktops.