> At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks.

This is the heart of it for me. All the new monetization models developed in the last 20 years suck. I don't want software as a service, I don't want freemium, I certainly don't want to be the product for ad-supported software. All I want is to pay you for the thing and get the thing and then for you to leave me alone until you release a new version of the thing.