"IR #2 [...] running water, indoor toilets [...]"

What the heck ?? people have had runningg water waaay before we steam engines were used.
and indoor toilets ... even the Indus Civilisation in 3000 AC have had them. and the Greeks, and the Sumerians, and ...

The Mandrake Team created a dependency tool (urpmi) at a time when only debian did, and poor redhat users had to download dependencies by hand.
The Mandriva Team improved on the -drake family of tools, and came up with a centralized configuration panel : the MCC ; SuSE was doing the same ahead of 6 months, and poor debian users had to dpkg-reconfigure each packages by hand.

In all that time, it was still the same people doing the good job (Pixel, warly, fpons, and so on).

Now that they have all left (fired or underpaid), and are not contributing to mageia either, you should realize that you are talking about a completely different product which only retains the name and the history of its ancestor, with a freshly hired off-shore development team.

Even the Mageia Team is no more than a shadow of the original team, with former interns, and support engineers made software developers.

There is no magic is this world.