“ You haven’t made a case for why free content should be more important than relevance.”

I didn’t make that claim, i am contesting the claim “Only relevance should decide ranking”. I am arguing ease of accessibility should be a factor.

Unless you mean as a tie-breaker in the niche case of equally-relevant results, then you're making the claim that it's better to see less relevant (or nonrelevant) results just because they have some other quality beyond relevance.