Pick one.

Judging a distribution by how fast they release is a poor metric in my opinion. Everyone seems to forget how long it took CentOS to get releases out the door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - Take a look at the days for all releases and you'll see what I mean. This isn't unusual. Alma has cloudlinux people basically doing all the work and they already had the system and know how in place. So of course they were ready quicker than others. That's unfortunately how it works. I'm not surprised either no one complained about how long it took Oracle to build their 9 (44 days).

More choices are always better, regardless of the time it takes for their version to be shipped out to users.

I don't really think this is a good idea. I am of the opinion that more EL distributions, the better. There's currently "the big three" I can think of right now: Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux. This gives the EL community a choice in what they want to use if they do not want to use RHEL. If you go back some years, it was: CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle Linux. Users had a choice of what they wanted to use. Today should be no different. As we know, CentOS obviously was the most common choice, but Scientific Linux was there too, and it was very well maintained. When 8 came around, the maintainers of SL had come out and said that they would continue to maintain 6 and 7 till end of life and not develop 8, and encouraged the use of CentOS instead. So it was either CentOS 8 or Oracle Linux 8. A lot of folks chose the former, as you can imagine. And then red hat decided that the community couldn't have that anymore and pulled the rug out from under us. Some people speculate to force people to get red hat subscriptions. Regardless if that's true or not or whatever the motives were, it was looking more and more like the only choice was going to be Oracle Linux. Rocky and Alma coming around to provide additional EL distributions to fill the void is a good thing, not a bad thing. It offers the community a choice and some assurance that there will be binary compatibility between them all and their upstream RHEL. Ultimately, that's important. I wouldn't want to see a situation where EL distributions decide to merge and then it decides to be "taken away" again (maybe not red hat, but some other company, perhaps). As an aside too, having CentOS Stream existing also is a good thing in the long run for everyone involved. More stable EL's that follow RHEL, the better and also a foundation like Stream to get an idea of what's coming down the pipe (not just for users, but developers too) is a good thing.