Every time I use it, I have this mental image of using a 500 ton press to crack a walnut. It's ludicrous overkill, but it brings a certain satisfaction to be able to use arbitrary precision maths when I don't need to, and use nonlinear fits for graphs where nobody looking at the result will even begin to appreciate the difference it makes.
This is the problem -- there is a "long tail" of people like me that have used Mathematica at university that are loathe to let go, but can't really justify the ongoing price.
This is why there are free editions of many paid tools. IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio have free "community editions", for example. More importantly, the build tools are generally free.
Even eye-wateringly expensive enterprise products with "call us" pricing have free editions! For example, VMware ESXi, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server all do.
Wolfram is one of the last all-proprietary, no-free option, no open-source holdouts, especially in the space of "general purpose languages".
Perhaps Wolfram Alpha is a "free option" for the once-in-a-blue-moon use case.
But you might lose any work at any moment, if Wolfram decides to turn it off.
I paid for the $200 license back in high school 10 years ago and it was absolutely amazing; Really ahead of its time and well worth the money. But today as a software engineer the only feature I’m missing in Python is the ability to run natural language expressions in the middle of my code. Besides that, Python is far superior thanks to the community investment and the ability to easily deploy my code.
Nowadays my daily workflow is mainly based on Python and Julia, I use Mathematica just for symbolic calculations (solving differentialequations, computing integrals...)
P.S. Once I had the chance to use Mathematica 12 on a server in my University, but I found that it offered nothing that I could need that wasn't already in version 5...
What can you do with a hobby license from Wolfram? Use the software. You can't really distribute it, put it in production, or anything else besides serve your own compute needs. They forbid you from using the Home versions for any non-personal use: you can't bootstrap your startup with it. You're not allowed to get reimbursed for it by your employer. You're not allowed to use it for academic purposes. The service plan lets you use your license on a second computer, but dual boot counts as a second computer. You can't upgrade your license, you can only buy a new one. It's almost as though they don't want you to use their software.
Why would anyone who doesn't already have experience with Mathematica pay for this license?
You can get a 15-day trial, by the way.
Why would anyone pay $100+ for a couple of games? Or for Photoshop? Or for a pair ski goggles? Or for a bottle of wine? Or for a ticket to a show? Or for a radial saw?
The difference with Mathematica is that if you don't know you like and need it already, there are numerous free and less expensive tools that do a great job, and they (usually) don't have restrictions on what you can do with them. I can make a Python notebook and start a business with it. I can use my hobby Julia code for academic research.
Some people find enough value in Mathematica, Matlab, Tableau, JMP or commercial IDEs, compilers, libraries, etc. to prefer them to the free unrestricted alternatives available.
Some people like iPhones and Macs, some people say that there are numerous less expensive devices that do a great job and don't have restrictions on what you can do with them.
But pricing isn't the only problem here. The licensing model would have to be far more permissive. Plus I think any language that hopes to be successful would at least require an open source compiler, runtime and standard library.
A perpetual license for Office Professional 2021 costs low double digits (depends on locale). They also don't really enforce checks for non-commercial use. As a result, almost every office uses Excel. It still doesn't replace python/C++ for deployment.
I'll have to disagree with your conclusion.
Excel has been the de facto standard for spreadsheets for a couple of decades so its user base is not because of how the office suite is priced right now, but because it is "what everyone uses".
This effect is even so powerful that despite Apple's suite (whatever it is called this year) being free, and various free online offerings exist that are adequate for a large chunk of users, Microsoft can still price licenses relatively high.
The hobbyist license wasn't priced by the year, just outright single charge. Is the by-the-year version you see one with continued upgrades?
[ Edit : the edit directly above answers this. thanks! ]
The hobbyist license is less than $200 per year. What kind of pricing would make it practical for you?
[Edit: The student license (non-expiring) was $139 twenty years ago, $176 today. That may be "expensive" but many textbooks cost more than that.]