If you look at the frenzy of activity that happened after midjourney became accessible, that was awesome for everyone. Midjourney probably got help running their model efficiently and a ton of progress was quickly made.

I'm pretty sympathetic to a company doing a windowing strategy: prepare the API as a sort of beta release timed with the announcement. Spend some time cleaning up the code for public release (at Google this means ripping out internal dependencies that aren't open source), and then release a reference inference implementation along with the weights.

That's pretty reasonable. I wanted to push back on this idea that "the reason Google isn't dropping model + weights is because the corporate screws are coming down hard"

Google isn't waiting to release the weights so that they can profit from this. It's essentially the first step in the process, and serving via API gives them valuable usage data they they might not get if/when it's open sourced