I think there's a couple of reasons. 1) Blender is ~25 years old and has been open source for ~20. That's a lot of development hours. 2) Blender marketplace a

I think there's a couple of reasons. 1) Blender is ~25 years old and has been open source for ~20. That's a lot of development hours. 2) Blender marketplace and the acceptance of the existence of paid addons by (most) of the Blender community means that addon developers can actually be paid for their work and to maintain their addons. Addons add a lot of features that Blender doesn't have out of the box and if you're using blender professionally you are probably reliant on addons for your workflow and it is a pain when they break (which they do frequently because the API is so unstable). Not being attacked, and even being encouraged to charge for open source software (and adddons are all open source) on the understanding that not all devs are lucky enough to work for faangs, be tenured professors or still live with our parents, and that we need to eat is something that is pretty unique in my experience.