And I'm arguing that his displeasure with GitHub's price comes from the fact that he's underestimating the extra amount of time he will have to spend as a user of CodePlane because CodePlane is not remotely as polished as GitHub. I'm arguing that this extra amount of time will not be worth the difference in price.
"[...] developed an alternative that costs less and offers more of the "bare bones" stuff (more space, unlimited private repos) instead of focusing on the higher-level collaboration tools and web interfaces. [...]"
It's not just collaboration and web stuff, it's reliability and security. Would you seriously trust a tiny service like CodePlane to store your code? Both ensuring it won't be deleted and that it won't be hacked into? If DropBox has trouble with those issues, would you trust a low-budget one-man-operation with your 50 repos?
"[...] There's a lot of pressure to have a strong presence on GitHub [...]"
When people evaluate programmers they often have to rely on far-from-perfect metrics, like university credentials. Putting emphasis on GitHub and ignoring the other forges is not ideal, but it's such a big improvement over the old ways. It's hard to get new metrics accepted into the mainstream.