The permission model that GitLab has is one of the disappointing things about it and part of the reason we went with a different product for issue management (and I frequently grump about it). I'd really like to be able to define my own roles and assign different actions that that role can do.

I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web".

Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code.

And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality.

A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow.

There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."