Thanks so much for taking the time to reply—this really clears things up.

I disagree: in-place upgrades can actually be made by “Competent Enterprise Linux users” (whatever that may mean). Not every system will be upgraded that way, for sure, but it’s not rocket science either. Especially if you come from the Ubuntu/Debian world where they have in-place upgrades since almost forever.

What I do agree is that in-place upgrades was never a sales point of “Enterprise Linux”.
I think the rise of Ubuntu in the cloud market made some people say “Why can’t we have that?”, but I don’t think the traditional “Enterprise Linux” users really care that much, as the first Anonymous said.

To summarize, it comes down to time. It’s not a simple fix and it’s not something that my team can spend a lot of time on. Our primary focus is on the integrity of our builds and how we get them to our users. We have to be very precise in what we choose to work on as our time is strictly volunteer. This is why we direct users to ELevate not only for upgrades but also for support in issues pertaining to those upgrades. Upgrades can and do work and we’ve likely helped users on upgraded systems. This not a problem, in fact it speaks to the usefulness of the tool and the work that the maintainers have put in to make it function. The line gets drawn at when an upgrade is botched and my team and/or the rest of the community is asked to help on it. This puts everyone in a bind as it is not something we have officially tried nor has a significant amount of time been invested into understanding the tool, the process, and the potential impacts of an upgrade.

I’ve always expressed that if there are those who wish for the project to support upgrades (via contributing to ELevate or another tool, plus providing support), that it would help everyone involved to form a Special Interest Group for it. The wiki page quoted in the article alludes to this. In the event that the group has proven itself, we will soften our stance. We just haven’t seen anyone step up to the plate for this kind of initiative.