I hear you. I'm on my second paid Pro (even though there are equivalent free versions), but I think of it as a donation, not a purchase.
Even though I see
here the price has jumped from the USD 9.** I paid to USD 18.88, I'll probably continue to donate--it's a hell of an interesting project, and a pretty cheap hobby.
I donated too to Acquisition when its lifetime price was more than double that of LW's. Still since I figured Acq was ~70% LW, I figured I should donate 4 more times to LW before I had supported both equally. As you can tell from my math, I'm not a MBA.
Shareware is pretty varied in what they ask. I don't know how LW manages to fund all its developers. I can't even see how the 18.88 pays the time of the Pro email supporter.
Anyway, just my CDN $'s worth. If LW looks to be getting greedy or to move away from being an opensource project, I'll drop 'em and go where p2p is about peers helping peers.