You really haven't answered it, though. It's very nonsensical. If you want to see "who's in" and develop for your paying customers, then should you not let people become paying customers so you can develop for them?
Your logic seems to work if you were not allowing trials, but only paying... THEN you would have only paying customers... its your gig, but I think its been a while since i've seen something this strange in software... and its telling that you're having to post the link to your answer so often in these comments. It simply makes no sense, and seems to be serving to drive people away or make them doubt your intentions.
Sorry you find it so disturbing. Especially since you said in another comment that being able to pay for a piece of software makes it appealing to you. I think that's cool because I'm not a big fan of freeloaders.
I didn't think fman would be so successful here. I believed that if I had told people "buy this whenever you feel like it", then they simply wouldn't have bought. At least that would be what I would do.
Another reason is that I want to provide paying users with great support, want to ask "so what would you like implemented" etc., and I don't have the resources to do that for too many people.
I just think, unfortunately for you and the project... you took a good boost of traffic by getting a near-top HN story and just let it die. You probably won't get a gift like this again...
Speaking for myself, I won't be using the software. I would have paid for it, as I want a GUI side-by-side, but i couldn't. A nag screen I can't even pay to get rid of is all but insulting, so I won't be loading the software, so the whole "out of sight, out of mind" thing is going to take over, and I probably will never open it again...
Now, seeing your decisions, and I want to stress that I'm not judging you for making them, its your baby, you do what you want with it, and I don't presume to tell you what you should do - just trying to share a perspective that may not be singular... but those decisions make me question the path the software is going to take, because they fly in the face of what I would consider to be reason.
Your logic seems to work if you were not allowing trials, but only paying... THEN you would have only paying customers... its your gig, but I think its been a while since i've seen something this strange in software... and its telling that you're having to post the link to your answer so often in these comments. It simply makes no sense, and seems to be serving to drive people away or make them doubt your intentions.