> IBM nerfed Ansible when they pulled the community packages off it and made them a paid premium in their Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Ansible was split into Ansible Core and the separate collections to separate the lifecycle of collections from Ansible itself. It was not a nerfing of Ansible by IBM. You as an admin get to pick which collections and which versions of said collections fit your needs best, rather than having to wait for new Ansible versions to be released. This is the same argument developers have in programming languages about standard libraries, you can either have a relatively large one (Python) that changes slowly, or a small one (Rust) where libraries are offloaded to the ecosystem and nobody can agree on what's best.
In RHEL, Ansible Core is only provided (in the support sense) for the use with RHEL System Roles (upstream: linux-system-roles). It still provides all the same pieces to do normal Ansible administration workloads. You don't need the EPEL Ansible package unless you want the massive standard library. Full Ansible support is provided by Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions.
Ansible was split into Ansible Core and the separate collections to separate the lifecycle of collections from Ansible itself. It was not a nerfing of Ansible by IBM. You as an admin get to pick which collections and which versions of said collections fit your needs best, rather than having to wait for new Ansible versions to be released. This is the same argument developers have in programming languages about standard libraries, you can either have a relatively large one (Python) that changes slowly, or a small one (Rust) where libraries are offloaded to the ecosystem and nobody can agree on what's best.
In RHEL, Ansible Core is only provided (in the support sense) for the use with RHEL System Roles (upstream: linux-system-roles). It still provides all the same pieces to do normal Ansible administration workloads. You don't need the EPEL Ansible package unless you want the massive standard library. Full Ansible support is provided by Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions.