This is the really annoying part.

Delphi's predecessor if not Delphi itself was $99 (Turbo Pascal).

I would have bought something like Turbo Pascal today. The minute they did away with Turbo Pascal I feel like they basically marked themselves as a legacy only company, I don't know anyone who is using them for net new projects that wasn't already all in on Delphi, you don't see new startups using them anyway. Had they kept Turbo Pascal, I do wonder how much more prevalent they could have been compared to now. It's still a solid way to make a native GUI.