As an ex-Azul employee I can say there's a good number of Azul clients using a Zing+Cassandra setup, so the price point is right for some people at the very least. Zing licence cost has also changed in recent years (3.5k per server last I looked, and that is before you haggle some bulk deal) so not sure if your impression is calibrated to that new price point.
A healthy distrust in profilers is a good starting point. Having decent external measurement and using it to test with/out profiler attached is also recommended. Some profilers are less intrusive than others. In this particular case the issue should be visible in GC logs, which should always be monitored.
Hmmm.... who'd have thought you can CHOOSE to pay some money and solve a problem... wonder who came up with that idea? people work hard and build a product and don't give it away for free?
Can you qualify shitload? certainly it costs more than nothing. How much is shitload?
"We really do have a choice... a choice of actually using and working with things that exist and are widely available today, or already living in a land of unlimited money for licensing of a single product that might be completely and totally irrelevant to most of us"
Assuming your software is making you money (but you wouldn't make money through software, right? crazy idea), you might have a choice between spending your developers time (which is worth money, I assume) trying to reduce the rate of allocation to something the freebie JVM can handle without pausing, or spending some money on an "existing and widely available" solution to the allocation/collection problem.
If application pauses don't cost you money, indeed a pauseless JVM is "completely and totally irrelevant". If they do, get a quote from Azul, maybe it's a good deal for you, maybe it isn't...
Finally, if you are confused about money and how a free market works, just hang in there. Marx promised us the end of history is around the corner and all them capitalist pigs will be the first up against the wall come the revolution!