Every since they moved their firmware development to Latvia, the pace and quality has decreased significantly.
I picked up a couple of Grandstream Wifi 6 APs to try and other than the gawdawful update process (that has thankfully improved - but you still have to get past the ridiculous initial firmware) they are wicked fast and so far a lot more stable/consistent than the Unifi counterparts. The unifi controller is indeed very slick/pretty to look at, but over the years I've come to realize that the "stats" it reports aren't very accurate so I'm back to librenms to gather/report on my network statistics.
Pretty funny that you identify Latvia as the turning point. Mikrotik is also from Latvia.
I still think Ubiquity rots from the head and whether they mismanage teams in one country or another should not reflect on the country the people are working from.
Intentions matter. If they outsource the development only for cost cutting reasons you'll get what you payed for. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of an average engineer in Latvia.
Me and some other colleagues worked for a US based company from Hungary. The company payed us well according to Hungarian standards, but wee where cheap according to US standards. (The payed US junior salaries for senior people). The people in the team were very knowledgeable, efficient and we delivered a lot of great stuff. It worked well for a couple of years, but then the company got greedy. They hired people from another outsourcing company from Ukraine (I think) and this time they went for the cheapest. The people we got only had little work experience and they paid by the delivered story point. The code quality suffered as they wanted to merge everything ASAP. I left shortly after for a different reason, but as I heard from previous colleagues the company went downhill after that.
So outsourcing can be a turning point, but for a different reason than you think.
I don't think you said anything different. I just wanted to bring an example that outsourcing can be a turning point for a company, but it doesn't mean that outsourcing is inherently bad.
I picked up a couple of Grandstream Wifi 6 APs to try and other than the gawdawful update process (that has thankfully improved - but you still have to get past the ridiculous initial firmware) they are wicked fast and so far a lot more stable/consistent than the Unifi counterparts. The unifi controller is indeed very slick/pretty to look at, but over the years I've come to realize that the "stats" it reports aren't very accurate so I'm back to librenms to gather/report on my network statistics.