I would gues taht it is so becouse those t the top of Embarcadero leadership are not programers but some marketing guys. They don't understand that for a tool such as Delphi you always need to be atracting new peepole othervise you are facing scenario that someday noone would be left to use your product (pepole retire, swithc to other programming languages, etc).
I mean which newbie developer would be prepared to pay 199€ for Starter Edition just to see wheter Objective Pascal (Delphi) is the programming language suitable for him. Especially when you consider that Starter Edition only supports Win32 development with no databases. It is almost like you would have Delphi 7 Personal Edition with support for some new features that were included in Delphi programing language (Unicode, Generisc, etc).
And when you also take a look at limitation of only being able to earn 1000$ of revenues before you are forced to upgrade to athleast Proffesional edition that just sucks.
Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with a specially priced Professional edition license.
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter-faq

Unles they change the way of their thinking soon noone wuld be using Delphi anymore. Even long term developers are leaving becouse EMB is to lazy to go and fix many bugs that are present in Delphi for years.
I could never understand how can someone go and implement new features/extensions of existing code when that code itself is buggy as hell instead of fuxing the bugs first.
Doing so means that al those bugs would be hampering your newest features to work properly. Not to mention that when you finally go to fix those bugs it migh result you in need to rewrite portion of those features implementations.

PS Sorry for my rant but I just had to get this out of me.