"We have a day to CELEBRATE! Not mourn..."
I love that bit.. gives me the warm and fuzzies knowing that the guy who hits you with the bad news stick can honestly give us some believable, unbiased news to make us feel confident. 
And how much... well .. if ya gotta ask .. you can't afford it... Just like the support services - they were advertised at thousands of dollars per year initially and then, no pricing. It does send out mixed messages to the wider community. Once again, almost there but not quite in the delivery - just like the builds of late.
Call me a cynic - but having sat on both sides of the fence - eg. on the core team for a couple of years, and by the fact you can't get a good solid kick butt build released for the last couple of years, why on earth would someone believe that the professional version, for a price we don't know, will be any better, without having an affect on the open source solutions being delivered.
Either way - DNN has reached saturation point to be sustainable. more people go to Snowcovered than DNN mothership these days, it took a few years but it's now passed the traffic stats on Alexa - and I would expect that trend to grow, so there is a market for DNN in the future.
Here are some traffic rankings of what happened with Joomla and Mambo - when Mambo decided to go commercial things changed signficantly, (which although is different since DNN is going to attempt both - free and commercial from the one environment) I've included DNN here as well to show you where it rates in the 'reality' scale of the internet and how it has fared in the last 12 months and how it compares to the other Open source solutions it seems to be continuously measured against.
What I have not done is listed many of the newcomers who are moving up the charts quickly just as DNN did in the early days.. I would also be keeping an eye on these products because if you don't like how DNN is going - you can go down the path of learning a new product and grabbing a new wheel.
While the traffic to DNN has dropped signficantly in the past 12 months, as you can see here, there is still enough market penetration in general to maintain it's growth. I can say for sure that I've had increases in traffic in the last 12 months, so perhaps we're just not using DNN as our primary source for tapping into information for one reason or another.
And over time, things change.. the vision for DNN was always to get funding, although it's an open source project, Nik has been pushing for money for years, and there is nothing wrong with that - but the way DNN has gone about presenting themselves to the public, I feel has sort of been a bit naiive, even though they have eluded one thing, their behaviour and actions have unfortunately displayed another, but most of us even after 6+ years are still here, however, there is without doubt, a split community and differences of opinions, but in any community group you're going to have this.
At the end of the day - if you don't like what's happening with DNN you can choose another solution.
I will be curious to see how this impacts the viability of contributing to the project in the open source environment. Afterall, would you want to really spend your time and hours putting in an effort that the dnn corp will be selling and profitting from? Or will your love for the project see you blindly contribute and hope the open source nature still remains the priority.
Interesting times ahead to say the least.
Nina Meiers
http://www.xd.com.au