I’m not convinced that Flathub should be the default.
We certainly can’t ship things that… we can’t ship. I get that in some cases missing functionality is frustrating, but we don’t remove things out of some kind of puritanical high-mindedness. In practice, that may be less important to individual users, but if you’re using Fedora Linux in, say, your business, you may need to care.
Fedora Flatpaks are built with our security polices and security-focused compiler flags. They’re built in our buildsystem by packagers who have earned the project’s trust. Flathub offers verification that certain applications come from or are authorized by the (primary) developer of that app, but that’s not at all the same thing.
Fedora also makes sure that everything we ship is free and open source software, and that anyone actually can build it. That way, if you’re building something on Fedora Linux, you know that you have the basic software freedoms available to you with no catch.
Fedora carefully and responsibly updates our packages when there are serious (and less serious!) security issues. There is no such coordination across Flatpaks, and no easy way of telling, across the board, where some unmitigated problem is present.
For most users, for most apps that we package as Flatpaks, the Fedora version is a safer choice.
You might disagree — and Fedora as a project might change our stance on some of these things as the situation changes. For example, if Flatpak sandboxing was universally more restrictive (like apps on Android or Apple devices), some of these concerns would be less important.
But, as it is, that’s our policy, and I think this illustrates why we don’t want people making “minor” changes and distributing them under the Fedora brand. Our choices reflect our policies, and those policies are promises to our users about our software. If you want to make different policy choices, that’s cool — but you need a different name.