I would have expected it is much more:
* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.
* If the free solution is good enough, there is little motivation to invest in higher grade tools.
* If there are "good enough" free tools, the market is very small for a paid solution so the price has to be high.
Developers tending to read code to understand a tool or even improve it, is a very rare case in my experience, which is limited to mostly computer science students and some researchers though.
There are many reasons why I don't do it myself, e.g., code of many projects is hard to read and takes a lot of time, implementation only losely helps me understand the tool besides edge cases where it doesn't do what I want, I am interested in solving a problem with the tool instead of understanding the tool.
* Most developers start to learn at a time where they don't have the money for tools.
* If the free solution is good enough, there is little motivation to invest in higher grade tools.
* If there are "good enough" free tools, the market is very small for a paid solution so the price has to be high.
Developers tending to read code to understand a tool or even improve it, is a very rare case in my experience, which is limited to mostly computer science students and some researchers though.
There are many reasons why I don't do it myself, e.g., code of many projects is hard to read and takes a lot of time, implementation only losely helps me understand the tool besides edge cases where it doesn't do what I want, I am interested in solving a problem with the tool instead of understanding the tool.