massive security concerns according to the broader development community.

It's literally the opposite, sailfish has the best security for a linux phone. You can use Graphene or Calyx instead if you want.

started as a closed source project

It's just the ui that's closed-source, hardly the majority of the os stack like you're claiming here.

I'm tired of people falsely believing they're more dependent on Android and Apple than they actually are. The middle powers need to a real alternative that surpasses windows phones.