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I used worked for a relatively well known type foundry. Font licensing still has a hangover, pretty much all foundries license by user number or organisation size. Having designed and/or mastered quite a few families, my opinion is the sense of worth most designers attach to their own work is usually severely inflated, and pricing tends to reflect that.

Cutting type used to require a huge amount of skill of course, but it is relatively easy to design well drawn type with modern software these days. It takes time to draw multiple weights and styles, but it's certainly not as skillful as most would assume. The number of new "foundries" that have popped up over the past few years is telling.

The amount organisations used to pay for custom type jobs was insane, given how much work it actually was to deliver them. The value attached to the aesthetic of the particular designer being hired is also debatable in my experience, very rarely did clients reject or amend what they were presented with. I've also drawn fonts that have been attributed to other designers, and nobody seems to notice.

I think things are changing slowly as the market becomes more saturated, but licensing like this is outdated in my opinion.

[solarkraft]

Luckily this is nowadays easily worked around with free type faces (like from https://fonts.google.com). I don't find many type faces that are so amazing I'd want kilometers of red tape around my project for them.