While I agree wholeheartedly with what you said, I still wonder about if Patreon might be a reasonable way to charge for services. There are at least a few people making a living off of Patreon. Of course, I've not really heard of anyone scaling it beyond that. It's possible to make a non-trivial amount of money, though.
What I really wonder is whether or not you could somehow look at Patreon as a normal payment processor for a recurring service. Possibly it's not appropriate for a non-service related piece of software (why am I paying monthly?). But if you had a service attached, I'm not really sure it's such a bad idea. I seem to remember they take 5%, which is not that bad as a payment processor with the benefits they provide. In fact, that's essentially what Youtube people are doing: sign up to my Patreon and I will make recurring videos.
But, the main point is that "I might write blog posts and you get to vote on new features" is not a business plan. Why do I want to spend a monthly fee? Writing new features might be a business plan (For example, Tarn Adams makes between $7-8K a month on Patreon for his work on Dwarf Fortress). However, you need to have an audience that wants new features and is willing to pay for them.