Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair it does take much more than $20 worth of effort to migrate all your stuff from gmail. How much more I don't know since I've yet to do it, even though I've been paying for another email service for more than a year.
The smart choice would've been to not use Gmail in the first place. The fact that Google doesn't have your best interest in mind is nothing new. The fact that Gmail invades your privacy by reading your emails to show you ads has been in there from day 1. I'm saying this, because you started with "to be fair...". As if this was a good explanation for the double-standard your parent poster mentioned. You can still fix…
Hindsight is 20/20 and the email landscape is different now than it was then. At the time I got my gmail (back when invites were still a thing) most options available to me were either ISP email or free web email, and gmail was one of the best. Not to mention, I was a lot younger and probably not in a position where paying for email made sense, and certainly not running my own.
For those of us that started many many years ago with gmail and kept it out of an inertia of convenience, now it is difficult to get everything switched off of it.
The difficult part isn't moving emails over. The difficult part is all the accounts and websites online I've signed up on with gmail that I need to switch the email address on. That's going to be a nightmare.