It seems to me that reasonably priced software is quite rare. To me and IDE is basically a fancy text editor and I've never really found one that really spoke to me (coding is not my primary job though), so $100/year seems steep for what looks like mostly a text editor to me. (Side note for all the vim/emacs wars, I'm quite satisfied with gedit). It also seems like the era of buying software is over; now it is a rent that you pay and all the other rents I must pay are going up so I'm not looking for any other.
So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same goes for Cinnamon and MATE.
So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same goes for Cinnamon and MATE.