If BigCorp wants purple widgets for their next massive migration towards Grafana and a bunch of free users are asking for the Foobars to be yellow then I don't see why it would make any sense for Grafana to take widget purplelization manpower away from their paying customer to yellowify foobars.

You've placed your upvote, your request has been noted and noticed. Next time there's dev capacity free there will be an evaluation of the most pressing open source issues and your concerns will probably be taken into account.

If you really need or want a feature, either build it yourself and send a PR or pay someone (probably the Grafana devs) to build it for you. Don't expect Grafana to solve your problems for you if you're not an important, paying customer, because they're a business; the focus should be on what keeps the lights on, not on which issue attracts the most vocal crowd on Github.

Maybe Grafana doesn't want what you want. Some features should not be in some products or implemented in some ways. Maybe something is of such little influence that you can be reasonably sure that only the free users will ever use a feature (i.e. features that compete with your paid offering).

I agree that entitlement is a two way street, but not in the way you probably think about it. If your users act entitled to support and attention, you're entitled to some kind of compensation.