There have been more than a few events which gave me the impression that they read the XF suggestion forums even more than the XF team themselves.
And even if they have, inherently there's nothing wrong with that, and can be a good thing. If I were an IPS customer I'd feel their failing me if they didn't do this.
If there's a competing product, service or company, you should always be looking to see what they're doing well that you're not. See if there's any features they have that you don't that gives them an edge or provide a better user experience.
Then decide if that's a feature your users would benefit from, or something the market demands that you missed out on, and if so, try to execute and implement and improve upon it to stay in the game. You don't pretend they don't exist.
That's not to say you can't still innovate on your own. For example, I love the new media gallery mirroring feature of XF. I think it's a great idea, quite innovative, new and something I've not seen before, and it helps solves a long standing media problem with classic forum based platforms with threads that are media heavy. However XF still has an inferior overall gallery experience IMO. The upgrade to XF2 introduced a worse lightbox than XF1, and it took 2 years to sort it. This is crazy, especially in a time when mobile growth has been exploding.
Now we're at a point where a new, much more capable lightbox is about to be rolled out, with potential for great UX, and a really cool new media mirroring feature, but the core experience is still poor compared to the competition. Whether that's IPS, FB, Twitter, Insta or an XF1 3rd party plugin. It seems the lightbox itself is restricted to load just from the gallery index. You can't even load it from the individual media page or react or do other basic stuff from within the lightbox, stuff that you've been able to to do for years on other platforms and stuff that makes the gallery experience much better on those platforms as a result.
Sometimes I wish XF would look more at the competition to see what works, and integrate some of those basics aspects better into their own product, either as is, or in a more highly polished or innovative manner. Just ignoring the way it works well elsewhere though, makes the [gallery in this example] experience worse when you compare them.
It's always balancing act between innovating, keeping up with the competition and maintaining your core features. But in the end the core features need to always need to be solid and feel tightly integrated. And in that respect I do feel XF excels on the
pure forum front (How IPS can still get this so wrong with such a large suite baffles me). But there is still so much room for growth in terms of core features such as media integration/usability, add on install and management integration, and better cross platform usability (native app or otherwise) compared to the competition out there in 2020.