Not intended to be said from a high horse but I think you can say "Events should be free" when you've run one - sorted the route, thought about the liability risks, dealt with all the communications and covered the costs that do crop up out of your own pocket. They're done for a motivation and value return for someone. Might be financial, might be something else.
Seems pretty natural to me that as bikepacking gains popularity events will be more numerous and the number of people with motivations other than mainly financial will be a few %, not many. It's not that they used to be free and now they're not, it's just that free events are where these things start out and they get diluted by commercial events. I think we should realise a free or cost-covering event is not normal, it's an outlier.
On a serious note it does illustrate the growing divide* in society. All of the local supermarkets have collection points for food banks yet there are people who think spending £2k on a ride and dinner is ok.
I suppose we could flip that. Why would someone put time into running a free bike event for a fairly predictable demographic who own and has time for >£3 grands worth of leisure kit when they could put that effort into volunteering for a homelessness charity?
I think it's about someone's motivation for running an event. They're rewarding to the organiser and there must be an element of self-interest. There's some really interesting stuff said about effective altruism, about whether you give £10 a month to a charity via DD or invest that money and donate a compounded amount in your will, about what they need now vs the benefit later, it all this applies to donated time as well as money. Perhaps the event is something that compounds the value of the time invested, your time is worth £X to them but an event can raise £5X.
Maybe we should be as critical of free events that don't direct goodwill to something worthwhile as some folk are of events charging £300 for a GPX and a tracker loan. I don't think we should be. But as riders we could accept how interest in free events might be seen as largely our own self-interest and a benefit we don't really need, the other is having a pop at someone simply making a living in this area.
Of course I'm one to talk as I laid down a huge wedge to do the Rov 150 (which I could officially call a race 
) but it did mean the chances of me ending up as a 28th century Otzi would be fairly minimal. 
