Canonical dumped Unity around the same time as Microsoft started a bigger push to include Ubuntu inside WSL in Windows 10. I'd bet they plan to buy them. Whether snap is bad, I don't really see it as bad, the same thing can be done with Docker. Running an app that way has its ups and downs, even if they made snap fully open I don't think people would swarm to it over Docker. I prefer standard packages for installing GUI apps due to the issues snap and Docker can have, but those technologies work great for server stuff.