Personally, EMR has never shaken off the "scrappy" feeling (sometimes it feels OK if you're using Spark), and it feels even more neglected recently as they seem to want you on AWS Glue or Athena. LakeFormation is... a thing that I'm sure is good in theory if you're using only managed services, but in practice is like taking a quick jaunt on the Event Horizon.

Glue Catalog has some annoying assumptions baked in.

Frankly the entire analytics space on AWS feels like a huge mess of competing teams and products instead of a uniform vision.