“I think (people) were just so used to the way things work,” [Red Hat Vice President McGrath] said. “There’s a vocal group of people that probably need Red Hat’s level of support, but simply don’t want to pay for it. And I don’t really have… there’s not much we can tell them.”

I think he got that backwards. There are many vocal groups whose support Red Hat needs to stay viable and those do not want to pay for the privilege of making a for-profit distro better considering how much pain RHEL already is to work with. Those are the upstream developers of the projects that are distributed by Red Hat and the developers of third party software that runs on Red Hat. Sure, Red Hat does pay for a lot of development but what about all the other projects? RHEL already has a tiny number of packages compared to other distros and its tooling has always been noticeably worse than other major distros and distro families like Debian, Arch, Gentoo,... and I do not see that situation improving if people have the choice to not support Red Hat or to pay for their test and compile infrastructure.