Like, support aside, what's the difference between "pay a premium to access professional services from the dev team" and "pay a premium to access a service already professionally-built by the dev team"?
For a company that can create its own professionals related to the product, only alt 1 (but not 3) will be free. For example, not all people feel the need to buy RHEL support; they use CentOS instead.
#3 means the company will purposefully put very useful features out of scope of the core, while in #1, people expect everything that's not very custom to a specific use-case to be open-sourced eventually - which is usually the reality.
I get where you're coming from, but is that the reality?
What I've seen in practice is that the useful features in question are only useful to very large companies, which is why they're gated.
Logic being, "if you're in need of this, you most definitely can afford the premium product, and we'd like you to be sponsoring our work since it's necessary for you to make money".
Is it better to let the open source project die on the Hill of Principles, and have nobody actually benefit from the potential wasted work?
Like, support aside, what's the difference between "pay a premium to access professional services from the dev team" and "pay a premium to access a service already professionally-built by the dev team"?