Scaling (the promise of) was based on GlusterFS. And died with it.
Forget the old acronym. I declare SCALE to be the
Storage-Capable Appliance Longing for an Epithet
until someone comes out with a better idea. 
No, because we are not the ones running the show.
Immediately following the announcement, some have already engaged in moving all their apps to compose-in-a-sandbox or k3s-in-a-sandbox. Without waiting for Electric Eel beta to see how the promised autoporting would work. And without waiting till the end of the month to see what TrueCharts would offer as migration path. With such knee-jerk reactions for users, it is hard to blame iX for not speaking until they have something they are confident ofâwhich means something that is already well under development, which means that the decision has aleady been made.
In retrospect, the bad decision was about scaling, and k3s to go with scaling. Enterprise customers are not interested in running apps on their storage, and k3s is too complex for the home user who just wants to run Plex. That left the original âscaling SCALEâ (which could not yet scale at that time) rather as a solution in search of a problemâŚ
Going for compose is more convenient for home users; enterprise customers (those who run the show) do not care, as they will keep on ignoring the feature. Like @dan, I suspect that the official catalogue will suffer yet another slow die due to lack of resources from iX, and lack of interest from the community to contribute. But it wonât matter if the provided foundation can just take compose templates from just about anywhere and throw them into SCALE.