Where I think your are wrong is when you says "political". What drives almost all decisions is money.
Not really, I think he's right. Money is just a means to achieve this political goal. However, I really agree with this one. Money makes everything possible: good promotion, good marketing, commercial cooperation, etc. Doesn't really matter if the product is good or not, money would always make it look good.
Actually, to stay alive, a development platform doesn't really need commercial support. As long as it has user base, it's alive. Look at Haskell, it has only educational support, no company (AFAIK) use it commercially (unlike it's impure cousin, Erlang, which is used and supported by Ericsson). But it's alive, it has huge solid userbase, a lot of libraries, used extensively in many research projects, etc. Same case with Lazarus/FPC, even better. There are still commercial usage of Lazarus/FPC, though not much, and the language is still used worldwide.
However, it's a good idea to have some company supports Lazarus/FPC, just like GCC does. Perhaps a real serious plan must be made for this, and targets companies which already use Lazarus/FPC.