While I disagree with you, thank you for sharing your decision-making process: you're probably not the only one who thinks this way.

In general, would you pay for a notorised build of free software, if you had use for that software, even if an un-notorised build or the source code were available?

I seriously doubt that he actually would. And in that unlikely event he'd be in a miniscule minority. Not a good open source monetisation strategy.