Just a general answer/info here at the bottom of the thread...
I realize our container build pipeline is not great, but it's currently
working and I will keep it working until we replace it.
I agree we should replace it, and there's lots of options, but I don't
think this thread is the place to go back and forth about them.
I know of at least kiwi, osbuild, some other build systems that don't
fully exist yet, switching to use quay.io, osbs2 (based on openshift4),
and probibly others.
kevin