I doubt it would make sense for them to do it. Most of the heavy lifting is from the controller which you could run anyway on prem and for FREE.
The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and SaaSifying the management experience.
From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to community contributions on Github.
The cloud deployment AFAIK would allow for better multi-tenant management, and SaaSifying the management experience.
From personal experience, running the controller on a Pi in your home network is good enough for most scenarios. Plus if you want to customize, you can poke around the APIs and wire up what you want. It's pretty powerful once you get the hang of it, and there are some fabulous libraries available thanks to community contributions on Github.