SF lost its way. My vague memory is that SF and also CollabNet were focusing on higher level functionality and while valuable neglected the basic code sharing growth/ease of use which is the rationale for all their existence. Too early into higher level functionality.
I worked for CollabNet from pretty early on. CollabNet had one major customer... HP. Everything got developed for a relatively stodgy old customer. They wanted centralized version control. They wanted tons of ACLs. It all was very corporate sales focused.
At the time I was in an industry collaboration and we needed a place to work together and looked at SF and CollabNet. Internally we also would have benefitted from such a tool so I even got an onsite demo by SF. It was impressive but also as you say enterprise focused and very different from their free offering. And that was imho the key reason: There was not one but were two offerings with different tech and customers. Focus was lost.
