I understand that and I don't have any illusions about things changing (short of major policy break in the EU that emphasizes that you can't beat the Americans at their own game and you need to develop a novel approach that the Americans can't compete with).
My counter argument is an application like QBittorrent. It's an open source app with no budget, it's cross-platform (including CLI and webUI, albeit MacOS support seems to be subpar due to lack of developers) and it is very efficient.
In the non-open source and/or Windows-only sphere, there is Mp3Tag, Notepad++, FastStone Image Viewer, Media Player Classic BE.
All very snappy applications, with a huge range of features/options (by the standard of consumer software) and they have the ability to handle large throughput.