Andrew,
First, thanks for your support over the years! However, it appears that there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here as we don’t charge you to use plain Maven in MyEclipse at all. What we provide within MyEclipse is a highly integrated version of Maven support, based on an enhanced version of m2eclipse, that we call Maven4MyEclipse. Our implementation has been enhanced to work well with MyEclipse project types and contains numerous other enhancements and simplifications to m2eclipse that are useful for MyEclipse users. It’s for these enhancements that we’re charging for as part of our Professional edition.
However, if you’d like to simply use “plain” m2eclipse, with a MyEclipse Standard subscription you can certainly do that easily. Just open the MyEclipse dashboard and select that you’d like to uninstall Maven4MyEclipse and install m2eclipse from the catalog instead. When it reboots you’ll have MyEclipse Standard plus plain Maven support for no additional charge.
As for why we have different versions of the product, they’re simply because adding new features costs us time and money and we don’t want all our users to pay for things that might not be of value to them. So, we break features up basically like this:
MyEclipse Standard: All Java EE tools and servers
MyEclipse Professional: Standard + non-Java EE stuff that’s really useful in many development scenarios
MyEclipse Blue: Professional + tons of WebSphere-specific add-ons.
Hope that helps clear things up a bit and keeps you as a happy MyEclipse user.