It see your dilemma, paying $2k+ per month for something only 6 people will use doesn't make sense.
We looked at increasing the granularity of the licensed userbase (have some CE users, some EES users, and some EEP users on the same installation). This is something established players like Salesforce and Zendesk don't do, probably for a good reason. We now have to make this granularity for GitLab.com (which is running GitLab EE). But we're very afraid of selling this since it will likely greatly complicate the sales process.
We also looked at increasing the granularity of the licenses. You used to be able to pay per feature instead of having to make a bigger jump. This didn't work since it increased the complexity too much.
For larger customers we can spend time to figure out what the value is and discount if that is appropriate. Your team is on the smaller side but feel free to reach out to sales@gitlab.com to see what we can do (please consider including a link to this comment).
Obviously a great thing would be to have the other users in the company also benefit from Enterprise Edition features so the value is higher than the cost. But your comment indicates that chance is low.
I'm sorry that I don't have a solution.