* compatibility with msys2. It's one of the best environments on Windows for building cross-platform apps (where cross-platform is Windows, OSX, and Linux). Ideally, I'd like to run a Windows VM for the CI build and have artifact uploads, all through the msys2 shell. I see a single rumbling here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts: you're totally right, this feature has much interest by the community and is an high priority. By the way, this is also a very complex topic, as you need to provide great flexibility but at the same time the best UX. As usual, we move by iterating on the issue by little steps: first of all we need the basic building blocks, on top of them we can create the final feature. I mostly agree that test results and other "custom" information must be extracted automatically from logs, but we need to provide a generic model that can be easily adapted to everyone. Iterations on that brought us code coverage information, artifacts for failed jobs and browsing and online display of artifacts (ready to be released in 9.2), and we provide also workarounds, like using GitLab Pages, that can solve some scenario until the work is completed. I'd like also to mention our current effort in supporting CodeClimate (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4044). We will continue on this path (one of the issues you mentioned has the "direction" label), always open in receiving feedback and promoting collaboration at any level.
Everything else requires maintaining more pieces of infrastructure and is not integrated so nicely.
I agree that Gitlab is far from perfect, but it's the best solution in this space IMO.