I hoped I would finally get real competition from an open source developer, sadly it’s just one of my former course student who took the course I made 2 years ago and he just slightly changed the default values of the patch given in the course to make better benchmark results (I can do it easily too, but image quality will suffer of course).
He thought Eevee was better than Cycles and spread that Idea for years, then told as much he could that E-Cycles had bad image quality (you can watch the E-Cycles gallery to see how good you find his opinion):
to finally use scrambling distance in his build with even harder settings to push render times further…
He is good in marketing with his affiliate and even managed to let some skilled creators here think he came up with an original product. At least he showed their is interest in simple builds with no real new features.
So I could make a version of E-Cycles with none of the new features, just basically E-Cycles from 2 and a half years ago for $39 as it takes little time to manage a build like that. At least it would have proven image quality and I could add a slider to get 4x faster render times for people wanting good render times and not caring about quality much.