I consider myself a real developer and I have contributed a fair share to this forum (both Honorbuddy and Demonbuddy). And while you say that other developers get lots of donations, I can say with certainty that it is not the case. People simply do not donate unless they get more out of doing so. Sure, you get 3-5$ per month - but that's not really much considering the amount of time being put into developing, updating and offering support for the profile. I litterally spent 15 hours a day on a demonbuddy plugin and it was one of the top threads with many users at the beginning of DB - and I received about 15$ per month for at least 200 hours of coding + many hours of support. The ones that "donated" most to me, were actually the DemonBuddy developers who offered me my money back for the 3-session license I had bought + a D3 game key.
The fact that he uses ZapRecorder is not a bad thing. ZapRecorder is a great tool to gather hotspots, and frankly - gathering hotspots for a profile is indeed the boring part that any monkey can do. What makes a profile worth of a payment, is what's done to the profile after hotspots has been gathered, the support for the profile and the fact that you don't have to do it yourself. If your opinion is that the profile only takes 30 min to make, then I see nothing stopping you from making it yourself instead of buying one (that I am quite sure took at least several hours of making, testing and perfecting).
With that said, I do think it's wrong advertising features on this forum, which is only in a paid version (I don't know if that is actually the case, I just read claims of it).
You will also soon be seeing free versions of some of my paid products around these forums (I'm thinking my mining/herbalism profiles at first, only supporting 1-350 - at first I wanted to limit it to a lower skill level, but I also want to show that continent changes etc works in the free version, so one can get a real feel of the extended profile). This is not a grey-zone of the rules on these forums, it's what we've been directly told by the moderators that we are allowed to do - and it is required of us if we want avatars or signatures with any resemblance to our website. As you can see, I currently have no avatar, it was removed by mods because it was a botHaven avatar, and I didn't have a free version of my profiles on the forums.