Not a bad take on BlueSky. The other funny side of it is that many of the users there don’t want any federation to happen at all.
It’s not unreasonable though that they have wanted to make sure their system of federation etc works well before they open it up, and that that has taken some time. By all accounts they have a small team and are generally making slow progress, and if they see themselves as competing with Twitter, they probably think it needs to work well straight out of the gate.