I hear you. For the sake of completeness, here is the other side of the argument from students that use IDA for reverse engineering. Those activities are really about cracking freemium/shareware apps and the associated subculture is a little... well... special. I have heard countless times that IDA should cost $200 and the author should work with the community to improve the tool...
My stance is that the tool is very specialized, unique and the cost is reasonable for professional usecases.
I know I'm repeating myself here, but I want to make sure I communicate this:
IDA's price is so low that it actually harms the market for professional reverse engineering tools. Most useful products you can build --- tracers, visualizers, emulators, pattern matchers, debuggers --- fit into IDA's orbit. As products, as "feature/function/benefit" statements, they are subsets of IDA. But they're chained down by IDA's price. Just like IDA, they have to serve a small market of users who make tens of thousands of dollars per week using the tools, but the market optics make it hard to charge even a significant fraction of the (low) total cost of IDA.
It's sort of hilarious to me to see what Hopper is doing to the market. "Ruining it entirely" wouldn't be far from the truth. I'm only sort of complaining. Viscerally, I'm thrilled that Hopper exists.
The software security bill rate for people who are competent with IDA and can find bugs black-box with it exceeds $3k/day. Source: until Friday, I'm a principal at a very large software security consulting firm.
That's for projects denominated in billable days. Talented specialists do even better, on fixed-price projects for specific targets. Rates get higher for cryptographic work, as well.
I am not talking about selling vulnerabilities. I have never sold a vulnerability to anyone, nor have I (to my knowledge) done any software security work for any division of the USG or any other government, nor would I.
Don't work in AV. There are worse things about AV than the pay scale.
My stance is that the tool is very specialized, unique and the cost is reasonable for professional usecases.