I was only mentioning that sense of "free" tangentially, and I wasn't bemoaning my own situation, just theorizing that they could get much greater mass market penetration (which they seem to want) with a free tier.

I guess it wasn't very clear, but what I really meant was an open platform for hacking on. As it is it's very difficult to use Mathematica as a normal programming language, and it's clearly not designed for that (even though there is a vocal contingent at Wolfram that wants people to try anyway). If it were split off into two projects - a completely open core language and a set of closed symbolic math APIs + frontend tools on top of that language - then it would open it up for anyone to hack, create and innovate on, instead of playing around in their very heavy and very limited garden with no option to integrate with other tools, distribute, or improve and extend the language.