I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.
A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.