I’d say this is sort of a “different perspectives” thing.
You’re looking at it from a “the alternative was everything being discussed out in the open from day one” perspective. Justin is looking at it from a “the alternative was Red Hat deciding this didn’t need to happen in Fedora at all and doing an end run around us” perspective.
That’s why to Justin (and, honestly, me) this is on the good end of the possibility spectrum. I’m happier that RH is trying to do Hummingbird via Fedora - yes, even with the initial, probably-unnecessary secrecy - than just doing it independently (which runs the risk that, in a few years, RH turns around and goes “and why are we even funding this Fedora thing any more?”)
From inside Red Hat, especially if you don’t work on Fedora, it is possible/tempting to look at Fedora as a source of strife. It’s got all these people in it, with opinions, who aren’t on the payroll! You can’t tell them what to do or think or complain to their manager! They have eternal arguments about everything! You have to write a wiki page and convince some person you’ve never heard of that your idea is good! Who needs this?
So we’re kind of constantly fighting a tendency for RH to just spin stuff up in channels it 100% controls, which tends to seem easiest at first then turn out to be a mess after a few years.
I agree that ideally this should’ve just been spun up openly from day one, but I also get where Justin’s coming from in thinking it’s a lot better than it could have been (it could have been RH announcing “OpenBird” or something and dumping some repos on GitLab).