What is going on with RHEL/EPEL 9?

After installing RHEL 9 I added the EPEL9 repository for additional software since the OS comes with a very limited set of packages which are not nearly enough for any practical desktop/development use. However, EPEL9 also has a limited number of additional packages.

I use Fedora but I wanted to give a try to a more stable but familiar Linux distro with a longer period of support for the purpose of developing mainly open source C++/Fortran/MPI/OpenMP software for engineering and scientific purposes without the problems encountered by the frequent updates of not so well tested packages from Fedora which, after all, is a testbed for new technologies. I thought that since an organisation like CERN is using it for scientific applications then it would also be suitable for me. I also noticed that RHEL exhibits a higher performance compared to Fedora, probably because of kernel optimisations and tuning, which is very important for running computationally intensive tasks over a period of a few days.

However, the packages which come with this distro are very limited and so I made several requests to Bugzilla for the branching and building of some Fedora standard packages for EPEL9 I need (although this is not a good long term solution for the problem of missing packages). To my surprise, most of the replies I received from the maintainers were asking me to take responsibility for maintaining the package because there seems to be some turmoil, confusion and uncertainty regarding the future of EL9! The other replies were pointing me to other package dependencies still pending for EPEL9. And so I realised that the provision of essential software not included in the leading enterprise-level Linux distribution is up to the kindness of Fedora community members to build for the third-party EPEL repository!

So, my questions are these:

1. What is the problem with EPEL9 which makes package maintainers want to pass responsibility to someone else?

2. Is there some other mechanism from where users can obtain software for RHEL9? I considered "spack" but since it compiles everything from source code it can take a lot of time to build one package and all its dependencies while the compilation may fail. Another possibility is to use "homebrew" but this means that one has to use and maintain packages with their own dependencies in three different software systems: dnf, homebrew and of course flatpak for desktop applications.

3. Is Red Hat considering ways to address the problem of availability of software packages for RHEL9 or should the users consider any other use case except operating as a server OS as meaningless? In that case, what could be considered as a more stable and long term supported version of Fedora, something like a Fedora LTS?