[grzesiekb]

Thanks for this feedback! At GitLab, we believe that work is never done, and we are always looking for things we can improve, in our CI solution as well! Let me address some of your concerns:

1. There is only one pipeline allowed at the moment (see issue about support for multiple pipelines: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22972), but you can use multiple builds / stages to usually achieve the same. We also plan to add ability to control status using exist code from the build (see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/25738). You can also use our pipeline trigger API with environment variables to control what get executed.

2. That is true, we already did some backstage work to improve that. In the meantime it is possible to explicitly depend on builds from the previous stages to download all artifacts in subsequent jobs.

3. I'm not sure if I understand correctly, what you want to accomplish, but if `[ci skip]` is not enough, then status based on the exit code may be helpful as well.