Hi Hugh,
First of all, sorry you didn't have a good experience at the event! Would you mind emailing me personally with the name of the event and specific feedback? Second, I can try to address your concern about separation between Firebase and Google Cloud.
Firebase is definitely part of Cloud, although we have not always done a good job of making that clear. Some Firebase products, like the Realtime Database, are fairly distinct from any Cloud offering. Others, like Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, share all of their infrastructure with a Cloud product but have an additional Firebase layer. And some of our newest products, like Cloud Firestore, are total joint efforts between Firebase and Cloud and are built to serve both developer communities equally.
That said, Google is a big company and nobody can be an expert on all of our products. While I consider myself part of Cloud I would be pretty stumped if you asked me to explain anything about Cloud Bigtable or Cloud Memorystore. I imagine what happened is that the 6-8 engineers you met were not Firebase experts and didn't do the best job explaining how we're organized.
- Sam