You're not the market for these tools. There are loads of enterprise systems built on top of this which need development and yes, they're still bought and sold like it's 1999. A lot of enterprise systems haven't been 'disrupted' yet and as long as Embarcadero is kicking then there is still a market for them. Oh, you've got this early 2000's system written in Delphi which you need to continue supporting, way too expensive to rewrite (think of the auditing and the requirement gathering, oh my.. this is gonna take years!) and now it needs to run on the latest version of Windows because of security constraints? Yup, you pay top dollar for that.

The existing "market" for this are enterprises who are stuck with Delphi for legacy reasons. As far as I can tell no new projects are starting with Delphi - which means it is only a matter of time when Delphi as a platform is relegated to history.

Embarcadero/Inprise/Idera or whatever they are calling themselves these days have zero vision.

It does seem strange in this day of cloud databases and connected everything, to differentiate their "Enterprise" product based on local vs remote databases[1]. A very outdated way to do things. I think Delphi has had that model since the 90s. On the other hand, they now have a Community edition that is free until your company reaches $5k in revenue.

[1] See: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

It is even more strange given the fact that the value of the database support is in the MVC-ish TDataSet/TDataSource/TDBWhatever framework which obviously comes even with the local edition and not in the database drivers, which truly suck and have better opensource replacements (and in reasonably large application get rewritten from scratch anyway)

It is expensive, but you're being overly critical I think. There are a lot of paid tools in the $1500 - $5000 range just for a single user and some cost even more for deployment. If it had cost $10k I would call it insane, but $3,600 isn't too crazy.

I suggest you to have a look visual studio pricing: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/

$5999 first year, $2569/yr renewal

That's for the Enterprise edition, which is very rarely needed outside of very large projects that will normally have a budget for it.

Even with a Pro it's also not just VS itself, but a bunch of other MS products. The exact list depends on how you arrive at getting a subscription, but if you are to take the BizSpark (?) route, it will get you Windows, Windows Server, Office licenses and a handful of Azure credits.

You have to look at VS feature matrix (for free vs paid editions) as well to compare it properly.