Yes, there are philosophically devoted people who will support a FOSS project. But the vast majority of people outside of the tech community do not care. They want a functional product that looks good and is easy to use. FOSS products often fall short of at least one of these three metrics. Most who use these products are not paying for them so the stable revenue to hire people to maintain, beautify, and market a product is not there.
As a person newly making his way in this space, am I off the mark? Am I saying things people have already debated into the ground?
The debate about whether software should be FOSS or not has been on-going at least since at least the 1970s, perhaps earlier: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.en.html
And yet FOSS software continues to be used and developed and has grown tremendously in market share ever since the GNU userland and compilers were paired with the Linux kernel. There are probably more computers running the Linux kernel than not, especially when you consider servers, smartphones, and embedded devices.
>> They want a functional product that looks good and is easy to use. FOSS products often fall short of at least one of these three metrics.
That depends on what the software is doing. There are many FOSS products available that are very mature and capable such as Blender for 3D graphics, Octave and SciPy for scientific computing, Godot for creating games, and many options for machine learning, and many other areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_s...
Most software has minimal or no graphical user interface, so "looks good" doesn't apply much. For example, how would a web server or database engine "look good"?
>> Am I saying things people have already debated into the ground?
Yes.
Software is unique because it can be copied infinitely and not suffer from scarcity problems: you can make all the copies you want and it does not run out. Software is also idea-based and does not degrade over time the way that manufactured products do. COBOL and FORTRAN software written decades ago still runs in banking and scientific applications today.
Yes, that's heavily debated since decades. We can stop pushing the goal post further and recognize that free and open source software are now completely mainstream.