I use Skitch daily... but I don't sync it to Evernote, usually just to screenshot, annotate and dump the marked up image into Slack or an email, I don't use it for anything I want to persist. Other than the sync aspect in the interface I hardly notice it's an Evernote product at all. I could get by with Preview.app and Grab, but Skitch's obnoxious default pink arrows and widely stroked text are perfect for calling out visual errors on projects.
Likewise, I use Evernote Scannable every so often without connecting to Evernote because it's a really good scanner app. Exports and emails images without any fuss.
I'd be perfectly happy if both apps were spun [back] off into their own entities too. Evernote as a note taking company doesn't do anything for me, but they do have other nice products.
I've tried to use it so many times, but I just can't work it into my own productivity cycle consistently. I end up using it for a few days, and then slowly forget about it. I know a few people with a similar story, but nobody who has actually settled on it successfully.
That said, I did pay for it for the year hoping that it would encourage me to use it (better organizing my work-life seems like a problem worth solving) - it just didn't...
I use evernote everyday. I put everything in there -- status reports I update every week, my own git cheatsheet, business ideas, documents I use repeatedly (e.g. instructions to ramp up new developers on my project), etc..
But what really got me using evernote is the combination of Fuji Scansnap + Evernote. Now any important mail or receipts I need archived I just scan them and they're in evernote forever.
And their iPhone app is a life saver, anything I need on the go, I retrieve from evernote. Forgot my health card? No worries it's scanned and available on my phone via evernote.
I love the product, but yeah it still boggles me why they need so much money and how you can build a big company from such an inexpensive product.
Evernote's killer feature for me is they do OCR of pictures you upload. I love it for snapping pictures of business cards, whiteboard drawings, notepads and sticky notes. You can go search for a word or phrase later and get a picture of your hand written meeting notes with the search term highlighted.
Their 60mb/mo free offering is much more capacity than I actually use though, so I've never needed to upgrade. But I totally would if my needs increased or if they had to lower their free tier allowance to stay viable.
I don't think the argument above has to do with the model of "unlocking things". The difference in League of Legends (and DotA2/TF2) versus most other contemporary (especially mobile) F2P models is that most of what you buy (your example being Champions) are permanent unlocks. I haven't heard a lot of arguments against that model. You're paying for a digital version of something that you now own, you keep, you collect, and you can essentially use forever. To me that's very different than buying something consumable (e.g. coins) or energy based that is literally spent and then gone, at which point you're expected to pay more.
More importantly I agree that this model heavily encourages the developer to design around that methodology (well described as "gamed" above).
To be fair, in this specific example - if I recall in Triple Town, the main thing you bought was unlimited play-time ("turns") for $3.99 (which follows the more positive unlock model). After that you could buy the standard coins (the shitty model), but given the design of the game I never understood why you would.
Even buying champions in LoL (you can buy skins too) doesn't affect the game really because every week the champions you get to play for free rotate, giving everyone a chance to play whichever they like and secondly, they are balanced so that it doesn't really matter which champions you play if you're skilled. You are really paying for a different experience.
So, the three models of free to play that I see are:
1. pay for perks - this is the traditional "you pay and you get something you can use", be it guns or coins or whatever. The danger with this model is that it is a very fine balance to prevent this from becoming pay to win.
2. pay for cosmetics - DotA 2 or skins in LoL or hats in TF2 or whatever you have. Buy things to change the look of your stuff in game, but buying things has no effect on your success or the gameplay. IMHO almost all free to play games should support this in some way.
3. pay for experience. The things you buy in game don't give you an advantage in the game but instead alter the play style or how you experience the gameplay. League of Legends gives you weekly tasters of the different gameplay experiences the different champions have to offer and you can pay to keep the ones you like best. I believe that this is the model (coupled with #2) that ultimately makes the very successful free to play games stand out from the merely moderately successful ones.
