In a recent comment on one of my DSP plugin videos I directly addressed this: "I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and

In a recent comment on one of my DSP plugin videos I directly addressed this: "I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by those who need them. They should be boring and never change, but the sound should be amazing and just immediately there so you can pay attention to the music, not the plugin, and then not have to buy more." That's the secret to open source software if we choose to maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need without drawing any attention to itself, that need would prosper and the OSS project would languish. It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do that and the cost is that the project either languishes or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking payback, in the form of money or in the form of attention, and it costs the users something but sustains the project more fully.