I absolutely agree here. But on the other hand I have read that 2009 was the year of independent game developers. Many people painted their pictures and used the fitting hammer to nail it on the wall.
There were thousands of them and many of them earned good money. They filled many gaps. Lots of good adventures came from small developers. Most of the mobile games were made by indies and there are web games from small and medium developers.

The indie market grew while big publishers lost ground with packed products.

And fact is that most of these indies switched to Unity. I have read about ten-thousands of flash developers who changed to Unity, many of them want to change.

I also have read that Unity sold more than 90 thousand licenses after they released their free base version. So this marketing tool worked fine for them.
I would call this a success.

Regarding the price policy:
When I keep in mind that they integrated 2 professional middleware tools like Umbra and Beast then it is absolutely fine to pay this little upgrade price for the technology. This is the right way to grow this technology, to let it become the best tool available.

If all this is not needed, there are enough alternatives like Ogre, Irrlicht, T3D, C4, Shiva or Gamestudio, though it depends on the platforms you are aiming for.