That is a good question, but unfortunately OpenCL was also a total non-starter for my case. We were adding GPU support to an existing large scientific compute application and wanted to minimize code duplication between CPU and GPU (so single source solutions like CUDA were far more convenient).
Additionally, while most users are on Linux, where the OpenCL implementations are fairly reliable, we also needed to support Windows. Unfortunately on Windows AMD's OpenCL implementation is also terrible. It is extremely buggy and the tooling is outdated. I'd spent so many frustrated hours debugging OpenCL back when I was an AMD shill, only to eventually discover that the runtime was bugging out. Occasionally it would even turn out that the bug had been reported on AMD's dev forums years ago without so much as a response.
I think that to an extent NVIDIA's lead is well earned. The CUDA ecosystem has been very comfortable to work in, the support tools have been amazingly polished compared to what I had been used to when trying to stick to "open" things like OpenCL.
That said, I think that Intel is likely to finally reasonably compete with NVIDIA. While their hardware still has a ways to go, they seem to be putting a large amount of effort into catching up on the software front.
Additionally, while most users are on Linux, where the OpenCL implementations are fairly reliable, we also needed to support Windows. Unfortunately on Windows AMD's OpenCL implementation is also terrible. It is extremely buggy and the tooling is outdated. I'd spent so many frustrated hours debugging OpenCL back when I was an AMD shill, only to eventually discover that the runtime was bugging out. Occasionally it would even turn out that the bug had been reported on AMD's dev forums years ago without so much as a response.
I think that to an extent NVIDIA's lead is well earned. The CUDA ecosystem has been very comfortable to work in, the support tools have been amazingly polished compared to what I had been used to when trying to stick to "open" things like OpenCL.
That said, I think that Intel is likely to finally reasonably compete with NVIDIA. While their hardware still has a ways to go, they seem to be putting a large amount of effort into catching up on the software front.