i can only speak to the early days (joined around 11 folks), but the engineers then were top tier and hungry to build cool shit. A few years later (as an outsider) seemed innovation had slowed substantially. i still know there are great folks there, but has felt like HashiCorp’s focus lately has been packaging up all their tools into a cohesive all-in-one solution (this was actually Atlas in the early days) and figuring out their story around service lifecycle with experiments like Waypoint (Otto in the early days). IBM acquisition is likely best outcome.