@Squinky, @Vega, others, thanks for engaging thoughtfully with this–I always like having my own perspectives open, and I’m seeing more of the other side of this argument thanks to this thread.
@Vega, I can especially see the point that in cases where the VST transition is non-trivial, the paid component is putting an additional burden on the community (and this joins to @synthi’s point above, in which the paid component is also bringing in a new energy that free devs may not want to deal with).
Perhaps these are things that can be learned from if and when there’s another big API transition. In hindsight, there might have been ways to get ahead of some of it, but (A) hindsight! and (B) they would have certainly been imperfect and would have taken additional time and resources that might not have been worth it.
This is the only “fact” out of your three that I think might be more complicated, and I think that complexity is relevant to this discussion as a whole. I’d rephrase it as “All else being equal, users would prefer everything to be free.” But what if the thing users get if everything is free is markedly inferior to the thing users get if there’s a paid option? In my opinion, VCV Free V2 is an astonishing “have and eat cake” situation for users who can’t or won’t pay for the VST option; they get the whole ecosystem and all non-VST development benefits that go into Pro with absolutely no outlay on their part. I’m not sure that deal exists anywhere else in musical software, although there are some moves in that direction (Vital, for example).
I don’t think VCV Rack as a musical tool would be anywhere as appealing as it is now without the vast number of free modules, so yes, those modules are certainly adding to the value of Rack’s paid option (as well as to Rack’s free option). But the other side of this is that I don’t think Rack as a development platform would be anywhere near as good, be open-sourced, or possibly even exist if the paid side hadn’t been a target. And the plugin version, the development and (substantial) support burden of which has fallen almost entirely on VCV as a company, opens up tons of musical possibilities as well.
I suppose it comes down to what motivates free devs. Offhand, I can come up with a dozen different reasons, so there are probably plenty more, and some of those reasons jibe with a paid version, some are neutral to it, and some may be against it.
Anyway, this post is plenty long, especially for someone who doesn’t have any plugins released yet and therefore hasn’t really had to deal with this in real time. But there’s a remarkable and complicated symbiosis happening here between VCV as a company, VCV Free users, VCV Pro users, the Rack source code (which among other things enables plugins to work better and do more than they could ever do if all we had was a published API), free devs, paid devs, and various communities that have sprung up around those things. I think if this symbiosis is balanced right it’s going to take this ecosystem (not to mention contemporary music production) to even greater heights, but that’ll take flexibility and careful consideration from everyone.