This is no longer a viable business model for a developer tools vendor. The bottom price for Developer Tools is $0. They are not targeting their tools at that market. That market no longer exists, unless you're selling some cheap editor that people can get religious about.
The fact that Free Pascal and Lazarus exists (and has for quite some time) is absolute testament to this. I don't believe that these products wouldn't exist if prices were lower, considering FPC pre-dates the big price jump that happened with Borland pivoted their focus to the Enterprise. The OP indirectly works off of the assumption that if commercial developer tools were cheaper, we wouldn't have need for free developer tools. That's a false assumption, since people almost always prefer free to cheap (even when cheap has a much higher quality) and there are always people who claim (or objectively can't) they cannot afford cheap.
This is why "Freemium" is such an effective business model in mobile. The illusion that something is free is the easiest way to rope in users.
After all, that's the whole point of the F/OSS movement, is it not? The point isn't that commercial software costs too much, it's that it costs anything at all...
Lazarus is less polished than the copy of C++Builder 4 Professional that I have, and so is practically every F/OSS Linux IDE out there (except those that were gifted to the community by corporations - like Eclipse and NetBeans, and I think Java is a fairly awful system requirement for a C/C++ or Object Pascal IDE). None of those users care, because they are not going to pay $400 for an IDE (much less a compiler - have you seen the prices for Intel's compilers, btw? No one's complaining...).
The reason why Delphi gets flack for its pricing is due to history. Borland grew its business in the Educational (Student), Indie, and SMB markets. The people crying about the prices are largely out of that market. Guess what? They literally don't care, because you aren't their target market anymore. You haven't been their target market for the past 15-16 or so years... They priced their tools aggressively low to compete against entrenched players and grow their user base, but that is not sustainable when F/OSS drops the baseline cost to $0 and deletes the need for people to look to your cheaper products as a workable alternative to more expensive products. When this happened, even Borland's cheaper prices became "too expensive" to many of the people in the market they were targetting.
They had to pivot to Enterprise, and in that sense... Their prices are pretty much in line with what others are charging.
The only people who are put off by this are those who still want them to sell 2017's developer tools as if they were still operating in 1995's developer tools market.
Sorry. No bueno.
FPC and Lazarus have their place. I find FPC to be quite good. I think Lazarus is severely lacking in polish. If I were a professional developer, I would scrape together the money to get Delphi as soon as I could, and just use FPC/Lazarus to port - though I'd likely just ignore anything but Windows/MacOS since the others are irrelevant when it comes to developing end-user software for the consumer market.