F-Droid probably won’t accept any builds with adware/tracking in them, so probably we’ll just stay on an old version until a fork or alternative comes along. There’s also a toggle on my preferred F-Droid manager app (droid-ify) to ignore new versions
That’s just the materials used to make it though, what about R&D, software development, etc? I dislike apple but imo the phones are overpriced for a reason. Adding RAM or storage to their computers though… that’s real price gouging.
I’ve used ncmpcpp and more recently Cantata to replace foobar, not as much customization but it gets a lot of stuff right for me.