The developer giving free licenses to big contributors is a very solid plan. It's an inexpensive way to reward the most valuable members of your community and keeps them engaged.
However, most people just use Sublime Text. If the software were expensive I probably wouldn't feel so strongly. Looking for and fixing bugs in Sublime Text would be a terrible use of my time. For many of us, $80 represents an hour or two of work.
Oh, they value it, all right. They just don’t want to buy it, at least not in the customary fashion. They’re more than happy to pay for software using bug fixes, feature contributions, community engagement, or even their own software. Maybe, just maybe, software for software developers isn’t a good product to be sold the way software is usually sold?