The Add-On Debate

Imagine that all woodworking ability has suddenly disappeared, and one day, humanity as a collective rediscovers it. We can throw together some pieces of wood and make tables and chairs! We don't have to eat off the floor anymore! Neat!
It doesn't really take that long to make a dining set when all you're doing is sticking rough blocks of wood together, and the work only requires a couple people, so the industry as a whole decides selling a table and four chairs is a pretty reasonable place to start, and customers are happy with this. Some dining set manufacturers later release extra leaves for tables and extra chairs for an enhanced dining experienced, and lots of customers are happy with this and buy the extra chairs and leaves.
Of course, over time, woodworking technology becomes more advanced, and it has become so popular that it's becoming more advanced at a very rapid speed. With the new techniques and tools, it can take more time to make dining sets. To offset this extra time, some woodworking companies hire new employees, but of course, more employees means more salaries to pay. So, the price of dining sets gets higher in order to offset these costs. However, these companies are still expected to produce the tables in the same amount of time, which can cause a lot of stress on the woodworkers themselves, especially since they may lose their jobs after the dining set is finished. Their job depends on having a table to work on, after all. Plus, the companies don't want to drive up table prices too high - customers are already complaining that costs are getting up there, but the companies need to be able to cover the costs of their employees, their tools and materials, and still make enough of a profit to keep afloat.
To combat the combination monster of time crunch, job security, and rising costs, some companies begin to do something a bit different: first they will sell a finely crafted table with mediocre quality chairs. While customers are enjoying this dining set, the woodworkers will work on chairs to match the quality of the table, but these will be sold separately.
This particular practice becomes very popular among many of the woodworking companies, since it is a reasonable way to manage costs while still ultimately providing the customer with a full product in a reasonable manner. The table is still usable with the chairs with which it is released, of course, so a customer does not have to purchase the new chairs, so there should be no issue on the customer's side, right?
Unfortunately, no. Some customers loudly criticize the woodworkers of being greedy, saying that back in the day, you paid one sum and got a full dining set. That may have been true, but the quality of the set was far less than that of what could be purchased today, and a lot more work is put into modern dining sets. But, critics persist.
This long-winded analogy is meant to explain the current situation of modern software along the lines of mobile apps and video games.
Back in the day, games did not have super complex tools, so they required fewer people to make, and so they could be completed in a relatively short amount of time. As Moore's law came into play, the technology advanced extremely quickly and more people had to be involved, but the amount of development time has still remained fairly constant over the past decade - ie, though computing power has quintupled over the past 10 years, dev time is still around 2-3 years. That's like telling da Vinci to complete the Mona Lisa in an hour.
And so, to the people who are screaming about devs being greedy with regards to add-ons and other downloadable content, I just ask them to maybe calm down a bit and really think about the purpose that these things can serve. Yes, they are obviously getting more of your money, but that money goes to paying employees who have not yet lost their jobs because they had something to work on, and, at the end of the day, no one is forcing you to buy anything. Plenty of people get on just fine without using extra content because many devs even consider that not everyone will buy into it, so they don't make it completely integral to whatever the core product is.
Add-on content is not the end of the world, it is not motivated by pure-greed, it is not even necessary. If you don't like it, speak with your wallet, and don't buy it.