Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I still feel they should've used those resources to improve an existing distro instead of creating their own Since Pop_Os is derived from Ubuntu, you could argue that this is just what they did.
The point is, now there is yet another distro out there as its own island, stealing resources and not contributing to the rest of the community (including Ubuntu)
What's stopping Ubuntu from just taking back the parts of Pop!_OS they want? Assuming they actually want anything from Pop!_OS to begin with.
To address your original point, I suspect it's more expensive and slower (at least, in the short term) to add features to someone else's distro than to fork it and keep building it out yourself.