tc is probably the best console runner there is and I agree, it made CI not suck. It is also possible to make it very fast, with a bit of engineering and by hosting it on your own hardware. Unfortunately it’s as legacy as Jenkins today. And in contrast to Jenkins it’s not open source or free, many parts of it, like the scheduler/orchestrator, is not pluggable.
But I don’t know about competent people, reading their release notes always got me thinking ”how can anyone write code where these bugs are even possible?”. But I guess that’s why many companies just write nonsense release notes today, to hide their incompetence ;)