So, you run an organisation that has two mutually incompatible requirements:
1. you have to provide free access to the GA community to aviation weather data
2. you have to sell your services so that the organisation can stand on its own feet commercially.
What do you do? You do 1. because you have to do it, but you make it so useless that your customers will buy the premium service instead.
As you are an ex-civil service organisation you do not have the commercial smarts that you really need, and cannot see that this is actually a really stupid thing to do when there are alternative suppliers out there.