My experience is that MIPS and ARM licensing are equally bad.

As an anecdote, I have personally switched a MIPS core to an ARM core in an SoC revision specifically because ARM gave us better licensing terms than MIPS. It was a pain because MIPS big endian and ARM big endian are not directly compatible with each other.

Maybe it has changed, or maybe it depends on what level of IP you're licensing. The company I worked at in 2006-2009 had gone with MIPS because they were incorporating that with all sorts of other logic (from third parties plus custom) and the cost for that type of license from Arm would have bankrupted them instantly.