This provider is really not in a very good state. How can we fix this?

[dbsanfte]

I'd like to lead off by saying I've been a user of Rancher since the early days of Cattle, and we pay for a Rancher support contract. We use Rancher in production, and generally we like it.

But the state of this Terraform provider is not satisfactory:

• The provider is unreliable generally (operations consistently timeout or fail, but succeed on retry)
• The documentation has not been updated to reflect external cloud providers in K8s 1.29+
• In fact the documentation is quite confusing and poor overall, it feels quite rushed.
• Many issues here have been open for years with no resolution

Deploying a Rancher cluster with this provider, I am forced to do something like this to handle all the non-deterministic behaviour in installing cluster objects:

while (true) {
   terraform apply
   sleep 1
}

Now, understanding the realities of software development, my assumption is that the provider is maintained by one or two people, with their time split on other duties. So the issue is probably that Rancher/SuSE probably just don't realize how important having a good Terraform provider is, and aren't resourcing their teams well. How can this be changed? I am happy to provide some pressure from a paying customer perspective if that will help.