Eh. Most of the Red Hat projects people complain about are targeted mainly at desktops, as opposed to servers. And when it comes to desktops, Red Hat’s biggest competition isn’t Ubuntu or CentOS or whoever; it’s Microsoft. There are far, far more users using Windows, who might be convinced to switch to Red Hat if it works well, than there are users using other Linux distros, who might be convinced to buy support if the packages they share work poorly.

Not sure how it is these days, now that IBM is calling the shots, but when I worked at Red Hat (~2010-2015) the vast majority of people did their level best to make things work well.

Some points:

* While "support" is part of their business, so is training, consulting, etc.

* Not sure what to lump performance tuning under, nor writing up white papers, tuning guides, and best practise docs. But there are whole teams which did that (back then anyway) for products like RHEL.

With support, wouldn't it make more sense for things to be clearer and easier, so there's less staff time needed to provide the documentation and support?

Saying that because AFAIK the places that pay for support (rather than use CentOS or similar) are more doing it for compliance reasons than straight out really needing (much?) support. eg they're going to pay for it anyway, even if they don't really use it