To be fair, I don't think HexRays is oblivious to this dynamic, and to that end I think the freeware version they offer makes a lot of sense. Especially if it supports AMD64, which I'm hearing it does nowadays.

That's not going to prevent many people from taking the five finger discount I'm sure, since they'd rather have as many of the features as they can, but at least nobody can say HexRays isn't trying.

Yeah, but I think the big issue is the lack of decompiler. If you're new to RE, it's literally night and day between that and "assembly with stack variables renamed and some helpful comments". (Even Binja's MLIL is a huge step up from the annotated assembly IDA provides.)

Biggest limitation in the free version for me, as somebody who likes to tinker with old games as a pastime, is that it does not support any other instruction set than x86/x64 and not many executable formats either.

There are a lot of good and interesting games that were made in the DOS era for PCs which used the DOS4GW DOS extender, and their binaries come in the OS/2 executable format (LE/LX) which is unsupported in IDA's free version. A lot of good and interesting games also happen to run on game consoles which use non-x86 processors.

Ghidra probably won't have plugins to support all of these weird old legacy formats and CPUs which the full IDA package does for a while, but hopefully it'll get there eventually. If it doesn't seem too difficult, I might even try creating a LE loader for it myself.

I agree that the decompiler is amazingly useful... but it's pretty telling that there's really no alternatives that come close. I sympathize with hobbyists that pirate IDA Pro, but I personally wish we could do better than that.