Hi,
I just read this blog article from austrian Linux expert Michael Kofler. For those among you who don't know the guy, he's my home country's number one Linux expert (known as "der Kofler") and most notably the author of a series of excellent books about Linux over the last 25 years.
https://kofler.info/centos-8-wertlose-langzeitunterstuetzung/
Disclaimer : I've been a CentOS user (and fan) since 4.x, I'm using it on all my servers, and yes, I know the difference between upstream RHEL and CentOS.
The article is in german, but the statistics graph is eloquent enough for the non-german-speaking users. It focuses on updates for CentOS 8, and more exactly the extended periods of time where there have been no updates available.
The author's theory ("unspoken truth"): while it's a positive thing that Red Hat is sponsoring CentOS, the amount of sponsoring is just insufficient enough so that the product is "starved to death" by Red Hat (e. g. IBM) to encourage users to move to RHEL.
I think if Red Hat really wanted to improve the situation, they could integrate the building of CentOS into the EL build system to produce both versions, RHEL and CentOS, at the same time. In the end 99% of the bits are the same anyway. If the delay of CentOS builds is really wanted by Red Hat, it would be nice of them to speak it out - and change the name to COS, because the ent is not true anymore :-)
Up to now I thought the big delay with 8 is more an accident than wanted. Would be nice to hear what Red Hat says about it. Maybe the problem is not known well enough in the Red Hat universe.
Regards, Simon