I think the real problem is just that we're all happy to pay whatever we would have for the commercial version, but for Isotropic instead. Not Isotropic with bells and whistles necessarily, but Isotropic itself. RGG is already standing on top of an unbelievably rich gold mine, and wants to scrap it and replace it with something that is almost certainly not as good? (No offense to the commercial developers. But software projects that take this long rarely end up doing well.)
Phrased in terms of pizza, it is a pizza company that offers the world's best pizza, and for free. But the pizza has a network effect, it's only good if everyone else is there eating it too. Doesn't matter, it's so good, everyone eats it. But then one day, it kills it, introducing instead a greatly inferior pizza and charging $X, when in reality most people would have paid $X or more just to keep eating the former pizza. Since it's inferior, people start leaving, which ends up spoiling the experience for everyone else. And now you no longer have this great community experience, but just a lonely pizza bar with hardly anyone in it.
I understand that RGG wants iPhone versions and such of Dominion, but developing those in parallel to (rather than replacing) a paid version of Isotropic seems much better for everyone. Unless, of course, RGG has certain requirements for its computer version that Isotropic cannot possibly accommodate, and has calculated that these requirements are sufficiently important that they are worth the probable decrease in quality (and potential subsequent negative network effect feedback loop) between Isotropic and commercial Dominion.