You need to understand that people like to complain about stuff. If they complained about the $50 and then you dropped it to $15. They got exactly what they wanted. Why would they not just keep complaining to get it down another $5?
People pay for stuff that is useful to them, the problem with light table is people don't understand why it is useful to them until they think about it/look at it. You should have completely ignored every complaint related too money.
VS costs hundreds of dollars (going into the thousands for MSDN). And it is used by hundreds of thousands of programmers.
If product A results in a increase in productivity people will pay for it.
Microsoft is an irrational actor: they will sink billions of dollars into VS without regard for direct return in order to secure Windows as a platform. Using them as an example is useless. Moreover, VS is "purchased" almost exclusively as part of the entire Microsoft stack. When I was there a tiny, tiny fraction of revenue came from anyone actually just buying VS.
Why? It's probably one of the most popular editors for PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript/Ruby/Python.
According to https://sublime.wbond.net/stats there are roughly 2.5M sublime text users. If even 10% of them paid for it, that would be 250,000. Assuming 10% is a little high, let's do 1% would would be 25,000.
Even if those numbers are wrong (which they may be I have no idea how he gets those numbers, and if everyone is using Package Control) there can very easily be hundreds of thousands of paid licenses.
People pay for stuff that is useful to them, the problem with light table is people don't understand why it is useful to them until they think about it/look at it. You should have completely ignored every complaint related too money.
VS costs hundreds of dollars (going into the thousands for MSDN). And it is used by hundreds of thousands of programmers.
If product A results in a increase in productivity people will pay for it.