I observed that my troubles exactly tracked the Labor Share of wages as tracked by the Fed: I was impoverished to the exact proportion that the country (and the world: I did and do a lot of export) didn't itself have money. If labor boomed, so did I: if labor took a downturn, so did I.
I retained such a high reputation that I was able to withstand a switch over to Patreon when my payment processor went out of business owing me months of payments: from my observation if you transition to a patron model it literally decimates your earnings, but they become steady and may grow.
I am also typically American in that I figure if I double down and work ten times harder and don't die, it'll all work out, and I'm getting up to what would be minimum wage for a factory worker (this is 97th percentile of Patreon accounts, by the way: I'm in the top 3% of all Patreon and trying to get into ITS 'one percent') and doing things like releasing all my existing products for LinuxVST and methodically open-sourcing it all under the MIT license.
I figure even as an open-sourcer I will not succeed unless I can be ruthlessly exploited for my work, and even as a patron-supported person I'm still subject to the power-law factor of 2018 life where unless I'm exploding in success, I'm failing. So my motivation can only be: exploit and crush the world, or out-give the most generous people AS IF I was already that millionaire, a Bill Gates just looking for ways to give it away again.
So I'm doing the latter, and we'll see whether I literally live to do more of it. Any little financial thing crushes me and breaks my spirit for a while, costing me valuable work time. My only recourse is to charge off entreprenurially into new prospects and hope for the best. The funny thing is, that's the same recipe for if I was trying to prosper with new commercial products, and I do free everything now (increasingly including ideas).
In an America with a saner Gini coefficient, I would probably still be close to broke, but I'd have a much huger cash flow and would probably be employing people. I know I can't do everything I envision, and I would absolutely be hiring if that was remotely possible.
I think you can do better on licensing. I'm doing AGPL, holding my power to individually licensee as necessary (with some pieces under more/fully permissive licenses where it makes sense--not cents :). I've got cool demos online, can track me down pretty easily. Indeed, studying all the Machiavellian stuff I can, given it's clearly being used at higher levels. I just want to be excellent to each other and make cool stuff, and eat.