It's not at all a given that these two thing are in conflict. The best path towards free TTS might well turn out to be to identify ways of making smaller models that are cheaper to train and improve on if/when we can split out things we know to do (be it with separate neural models or other methods) and train models to "fill the gaps" instead of the entire end-to-end process.

There are also plenty of places where the current modern "neural" models are too compute intensive / costly to run, and so picking just the current big models isn't an option for all uses.