[Blikkentrekker]

in my experience, systems such as Debian and Gentoo for servers have an entirely different market than RHEL, z/OS or SUSE: the former seems to be more so used by i.t. companies themselves that of course also need to run an i.t. infrastructure, and the latter more so by companies whose primary services are not i.t., but that need such infrastructure nonetheless.

Looking at Red Hat's customer list, most of them are based in finance, transportation, retail, hotel, and other such sectors.

Looking at Debian's statistics of use per sector, the plurality is companies that develop computer software, though retail comes second, but after that it's i.t. again.

This is primarily the difference and the gap that RHEL attempts to bridge through it's extensive inclusive support, which is what one is really paying for. The target of RHEL has never been i.t. companies.