You obviously don't understand my point. If we want to flex, I have a combined CS/business degree, so I do understand the system quite well.

What canonical is doing is essentially a make or buy decision. Make our own solution or "buy" an existing one. Since in the foss world buying is almost free, you have to have good reasons to invest quite a lot of money into developing your own solution. Good reasons would be better technology, better integration into the existing ecosystem, lower costs, etc - or vendor lock-in.

Canonicals solutions are never better than what the community already agreed upon. They are not cheaper for Canonical, since they have to do all the heavy lifting themselves. They don't integrate better, since the rest of the system is more or less vanilla Linux.

So the only remaining rationale would be vendor lock-in. Canonical wants its customers to build upon their products so that it can retain those customers easier. This might actually be a valid reason for snap. Canonical has kind of cornered the market here, but it's definitely not true for Mir, Unity, etc. Those were doomed from the start and a huge waste of money.

You see, wasting money is not productive. It's kind of the opposite.