Reading this from the perspective of a naive outside observer, I'm wondering (just thinking out loud) about the potential value of a hybrid approach of a) providing customers who know what they want a self-service API, b) supporting customers who just want their problems solved with consulting, and a+b) offering joint R&D scenarios in select circumstances that would progressively add support for novel workloads over time (like what's described here) in the pursuit of differentiation. Obviously this would be aligned with use cases that don't require immediate solutions/consulting. The resulting data might be worth it. And this all obviously depends on where ease-of-use sits, given that's basically NP-hard to resolve fully in this domain.
