[jsumrall]

I've been down this path, and if my experience is more common, then it really boils down to the classic "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM", and here IBM -> Confluent.

StreamNative seems like an excellent team, and I hope they succeed. But as another comment has written, something (puslar) being better (than kafka) has to either be adopted from the start, or be a big enough improvement to change— and as difficult and feature-poor that Kafka is, it still gets the job done.

I can rant longer about this topic but Pulsar _should_ be more popular, but unfortunately Confluent has dominated here and rent-seeking this field into the ground.