The GiantBomb Skullgirls thread does more to peel back the realities of cost, return, and reasoning. If you want to talk about the requirements of micro transactions you also need to back it up with the actual economics that drives it.
Sometimes a $60 price point isn't enough to actually cover the budget. There are loads of possible reasons for this. Sometimes a $1 game may never pay for itself even though $1 is cheap as hell.
A topic like this cant be opinion driven. Everyone everywhere has an opinion. The only real opinion is mathematics.
Wouldn't it be more like the only part that matters are the mathematics? Either way it's not an opinion but cold hard reality.
Though I think that also MIGHT highlight why mobile gaming is so fucked up and why the attrition on dedicated handhelds is nothing to celebrate: Real Racing 2 was brought up as something equivalent to a console experience, but at $5! And now we have a sequel that goes for free! Except it milks you wherever and however it can for money.
I think both models are quite possibly dead ends for higher budget games. Sounds like something like RR2 should've been $20 at a minimum, perhaps actually $30 or $40 and being in line with traditional handheld titles, but no one's willing to directly pay that just for the game, so instead they look into how they can make up for that, and so they thrive off of whales who don't care, a few people chipping in to make things go a bit smoother, and some ad support from those who won't pay, and in any case unless you constantly pay to speed things up the game is lame. So now we have iOS where seemingly no one's willing to pay upfront, only when they're caught in a position where they're hooked to the game UNLESS they fork up the money, while dedicated handheld games are "too expensive" even though they offer good value for their cost (usually anyway, there are some pretty bad offenders there) without trying to coerce microtransactions that eclipse the value of the game, and if they DO it's nothing you actually need as the case is for Fire Emblem. It's probably also why EA's relatively benign with this on Dead Space 3 despite abusing the fuck out of it on iOS, they got the $60 from you, so while it'd be good to get more they still got a huge chunk of money for you so they don't need to sweat designing the game around milking you.
Though given what's going on with Zynga it does sound like consumers DO ultimately reject the attempts at badly milking players.