Yes, I've been to several prior events and the number of folks that used to be Devs has certainly migrated to folks that are in for the free goodies.
I have to believe eliminating the "free goodies" will definitely return it to a dev conference vs. an Oprah event. Maybe this will be the year. This year the system said they found a ticket (actually several times), but apparently they were just dangling it in front of my nose, because I couldn't get through payment gateway, Google Wallet.
Each year registration is like a game of Google Plinko.
I'd be curious to know the # of user requests that brought the Wallet to its knees.