I guess that will always remain an unresolved mystery.
It is now. It started as a discussion of the prices, a questioning of whether they’re high, a comparison with an older monetization model, and what’s the best way to cope with the new model. Some of the participants brought up concepts like “greed” and “predator/prey relationship”, some others focused on that, and now it seems to be one of the central topics.
That said, I agree with you that if we’re examining the pricing alone, without any other aspect of the monetization, we won’t find it unethical.
The problem is that the pricing itself isn’t entirely orthogonal to the rest of the monetization. To put it bluntly, the pricing would not work nearly as well without several tactics that pressure and manipulate customers into accepting it.
Those tactics are not coercive, so it’s not a clear case of unethical behavior, but many of us find it ethically questionable.
A couple of common responses to that come to mind. One is that those monetization practices are also “industry standard”. That’s pretty much saying “everyone else does it”, and I would hope that we all understand that doesn’t really hold up in establishing a behavior as ethical.
Another common response is along the lines of “if these practices don’t affect me in any way, why should I care”. For all that I get to discuss ethics on these forums, I’m not really an expert, but I would expect a certain degree of correlation, if not causation, between empathy for others and ethical behavior. At any rate, “this doesn’t affect me” does not really look like a solid defense of ethics.
That being said, my foremost complaint about the new monetization isn’t about questionable ethics anymore. At first, that bothered me, and then I ended up shrugging and saying “screw it, that’s how the world works now, this is not where the Revolution will start” 
No, my own pet peeve with the new monetization is that it’s really the minimum-effort result. I’m not going to go into details, because I already covered most of them in the “Lack of Transparency” and “Quality Issues with Monetized Content” sections of my overly verbose analysis of new monetization. Suffice it to say that when someone is trying to sell you stuff and they keep screwіng up consistently and then take their sweet time fixing it, the very least you can say about that is that it’s annoying and doesn’t inspire confidence. If you’re trying to convince me to buy overpriced, FOMO-based, overly restricted content, then at least maintain a certain level of quality, both in terms of the product and the service.
And before anyone comes back with “if they’re so bad, why do you keep buying their stuff”, the answer is I don’t. The things I bought happened to work well enough for my needs. If they hadn’t, I would’ve requested a refund faster than a forum troll can write an inflammatory reply 