I just recently signed up for a paid WSJ account and have not regretted it one bit. Their iPad app is particularly great.

Here we are on HN with many people complaining about free* Facebook, and then also complaining about pay services too. It takes money to run a world class news organization. Either that or they can get paid in non money equivalents like "likes" or page views which make everyone but them money. Where the value is to fool someone to come to your page so you can mine their data for ads, and serve ads. To get people to subscribe to you, you have to provide more value than that.

I'd rather be surprised at how many people comment without reading the article first.

Put the url of the article into https://outline.com/ to get around most paywalls (including wsj)

You can search your way to the dozens of moderator posts about (softly) paywalled posts.