Timber definitely intended to just rock out & demolish everything else out there with their agent/forwarder/aggregator tech. But it wasn't a competitive play against OTel, in my humble opinion. Timber's whole shtick is that it integrates with everything, with really flexible/good glue logic in-between. A competent multi-system (logging, metrics, eventually traces) fluentd++. OTel - I want to believe - would have been part of that original vision.

It's just taking a really really long time. One can speculate how direction & velocity might have changed since the Datadog acquisition. The lack of tracing (anywhere except Datadog, so far) materializing has been a hard hard hard & sad thing to see. OG https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/1444 and newer https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/17307