Fully agree regarding your points about micro payments. Patronage, monopoly-priced copyright, and advertising have all proven to have bad side-effects.

IMO, the market may be acting rationally here. I have tried Octave several times, and always moved on with little regret. Genuine Matlab is tolerable for some prototyping tasks. A slow clone of Matlab has little value outside of academic environments where Matlab compatibility is required. Programmers use their favorite language, and others use a spreadsheet.