I dislike PayPal as much as the next guy, but what did you expect? ebay owns PayPal, probably everyone who uses ebay by now uses PayPal too, and loosening their grip would only make them less competitive.

Ironically, the reason they bought Paypal was because it was originally a competitive advantage for them :).

Funny how a decade can change things.

I'd guess PayPal would still be a competitive advantage if it were quicker to respond to competitors like Stripe.

Stripe might be more dev friendly. But PayPal is years ahead. They are available in most countries and you can practically do anything with PayPal Adaptive Payments. They are also doing a the Square like credit card processing plus many many other things.

I know Stripe is good. But It will be interesting to see when they can match PayPal's features.