The problem I have with this support of piracy myself, is that while there'd be millions of books still being published without noteworthy economic incentives, economic incentives matters to get volume and quality from at least a proportion of those producing creative works full time who we'd really like to be able to dedicate their time fully to it.
In other words: Even if (and that's purely for the sake of argument) I had the talent to produce something of similar quality as cstross, talent is not enough. It also takes a huge amount of time and dedication to polish those skills to get to the that level, and very few people who are doing it as a hobby can ever hope to (and/or want to) put in the level of effort needed. I certainly could never do that.
If we could achieve the same with grants or something like UBI, great, but I feel we'd lose a great amount of of creative works if it wasn't possible for a proportion of people to work full time honing those skills. And many of those works would be among our best.
A lot of high end software does have an education discount version if you're affiliated with a local college or university.
People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits.
Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.
The same goes for most contributors to D. (A handful get paid via sponsors.)
If you're familiar with my posts, I'm about as far from a socialist as one can get.