> However on the collector side you end up having to do the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder to make your own collector (or just kinda ride the wave and hope it works out). While cool that this exists, it's a lot of scope to ask a team to take on.

This is just plain wrong, binaries of the collector are shipped which are available to use straight away. You can use the builder if you want to create your own version with a selected set of components but it is no way a hard requirement.