My reaction was due to the "And boy, were they awfully buggy. And you didn't have access to the source to understand why it didn't work" part. They were not bug

My reaction was due to the "And boy, were they awfully buggy. And you didn't have access to the source to understand why it didn't work" part. They were not buggy, especially if you compare the equivalents of today and most of the source you would care about was there. The main thing that modern open source tools do better is the performance of the produced executable by modern compilers is better. But everything else, especially when you go into UI and UX, is much much worse (and most programmers increasingly treating their computers' UIs like terminals from the 70s doesn't help). I'll agree that the majority of developers today do not want to pay for their tools, but of course with the proliferation of free (as in beer) tools it is expected that the value that people see in their tools (especially when they are surrounded by free tools, like programmers are) will drop dramatically.