> I may be misinterpreting here, so please do correct me

I meant to say that being open source doesn’t automatically mean you can use the software commercially, hence the need for a liberal (enough) license (to permit you this option).

No ideology intended so to say :)

> Does the permissiveness of the license matter more than the utility of the tool?

No of course not. A useless, but free tool is still useless. Likewise I’d argue that a useful open source tool you can’t use commercially is equally useless to many.

> However, a lot of FOSS options would be much better off if consumers did contribute to the project

I agree with you here