Funny thing is, a lot of the System76 tweaks aren't specific to their system (or OS) at all. One popular example is the system76-scheduler, which you can install on pretty much any hardware or distro for the same responsiveness improvements: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler
Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.
You may be misunderstanding me or I'm not explaining myself properly. I don't want them to vertically integrate in the same way that Apple does, I want them to invest more on the software side by selecting a distro and building around it. If they can piggyback on popOS then great but they need to invest in software.
Realistic starting point: hire one Linux developer to daily drive Debian Testing + mainline Linux kernel on Framework hardware, then upstream integration/optimization fixes to mainline Linux and Debian unstable.
Upstream fixes would benefit multiple Linux distros, reduce Framework support burden and increase the usability of Linux on Framework hardware.
I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing.
What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?
PopOS is not wasted effort. The goal of PopOS is to have an out of the box Linux aimed at people new to Linux that has everything working out of the box. Specifically, graphics drivers working out of the box which is notoriously hard if you are running an Nvidia card. According to the Steam Hardware survey, it is 10th on the top 10 Linux distros[0]. Realistically higher when you consider that the Steam Deck and SteamOS heavily tilt the survey. I'm not asking them to build an OS from scratch and that is a crazy way to interpret what I said which was "build around a distro"
It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.
Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.