There's nothing wrong with hoping a freely licensed open source competitor will come along and lower the cost of developing in the space.

PyQT are free to extract fees from the ecosystem as long as they can, just as some open source devs are free to try to eat their lunch money.

No, that's not it. As I said, PyQt is excellent and I'm happy to be paying for such quality work.

> its more restrictive licensing limits the global audience

That means not everyone has a business model that supports paying a license fee.