> All of those things are of course user benefits, but they are indirect side effects. Users get none of those benefits without enlisting a developer to take advantage of them.
That is not really true.
For one, even users of purely proprietary software do benefit from the work that developers of Free Software do, because the market pressure exerted by their presence in the market does affect the pricing and quality of proprietary offerings. While that is an indirect effect, it does not in any way require "enlisting a developer".
Also, in order to have a free market choice in who you hire to do development work for you, you don't need to enlist a developer. That freedom of choice is every user's immediate freedom.
> The closer it gets to a “pure” user problem, the less incentive there is for developers to work on it, and the worse it gets.
But that has nothing to do with whether it's a "user problem", but only with whether it's a problem of people who value their freedom. If a user values freedom and thus invests in it, such as by paying a developer for doing some work for them, then they will get just as much freedom as developers who value their freedom and for their reason invest in it. The problem is not that they are users, the problem is that they are unwilling to invest in their freedom, and instead expect others to invest for them.
The problem is the expectation that developers invest in the freedom of users. Developers will invest in their own freedom first and foremost, obviously. If you expect developers to invest effort into solving problems of non-developers, you should also expect non-developers to invest in developers solving their own problems. Like, you should expect users to pay developers so they can work on stuff that is of no importance to the user.
