I've been following cockroachdb for a long time, and it irked me that distributed backup was something you had to pay for. Hat tip to the CRDB team for moving it into the open source product. It seems you listened to the criticism of folks on HN and took it to heart.

Why was it in the enterprise version to begin with?

(PM at Cockroach here)

There's a little blurb in this blog post about the decision we made at the time https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-were-building-a-busin... (Note: The blog mentions APL but we've since moved to BSL)

Quote: “The first [of the CCL features] is a fully-distributed, incremental capability for quickly and consistently backing up and restoring large databases using configurable storage sinks (e.g. S3 or GCS). The same functionality, but non-distributed, will be available for free to all users.”

I can't speak to what exactly the thinking was at the time (I wasn't around yet) but as you mentioned, the community told us that the non-distributed functionality (DUMP) wasn't good enough for the scale people wanted to run at. Makes sense, so we made the change.

If I had to take a guess DUMP was performant enough at the time for most of our CockroachDB Core users and their scale, but adoption has picked up since then, as have data sizes.