Quote - No offense to the "offended" but
when those two/three extra clicks
become such a burdensome task that it ruins my freebie shopping experience then I Should Qualify for $$Disability$$

I don't consider it as much a burden as I do an irritation. Irritations tend to drive away potential customers, users, members, whatever.

Say, let's shift the scenario a bit: 

Let's say that a neat must-have Animation plugin arrived for D|S. You happily use it for months, and while you wouldn't mind buying a paid-for version of it, the free version works okay as it is and the plugin seems overpriced to you anyway in spite of its usefulness. Suddenly, it changes its behavior. Now, unless you pay a few hundred bucks for it, the free version makes you put up with a few advert popup prompts that you had to click through every time you did anything in D|S with that plugin installed (e.g. save, render, open a file, etc)...

...would you be philosophically okay with that?  Sure, it's their right to do it and all, and maybe you'd buy the thing now, but that's not the question. The question is, would you be okay with that action?