I'm sorry you feel that way. I do still wish you the best of luck!
FWIW, the licensing is a sort of "robin hood" approach, where those who can most afford it and who stand to benefit the most from the software bear more of the burden. Those that make less than $500,000 can use Spine and the Spine Runtimes and ALL future updates for life, with no further charges. There are multi-million and even multi-billion dollar companies using Spine, but even those closest to the annual revenue limit are unlikely to find the Spine Enterprise expense unbearable. 2,200 / 500,000 = 0.0044, so the expense of licensing Spine is 0.44% of gross at worse and that of course gets smaller for companies making more than 500,000. I'd also like to point out any number of your applications can use the Spine Runtimes, there is no per title fee which is common with other middleware, such as Autodesk Scaleform.
Keep in mind, there are two key parts to licensing Spine: 1) use of the Spine editor, and 2) distribution of the Spine Runtimes as integrated into your software. If you are done using the editor and don't want to continue licensing Spine Enterprise, you can avoid using the Spine Runtimes in your software. You own the IP you create such as video, images, and animation data exported from Spine and can use that in your software however you like. Displaying images and video is obvious. Displaying animation data would require writing your own runtimes, which would need to be a clean room implementation.
