Unfortunately, the GPL mafia is right, and hardware vendors will continue to abuse their users with proprietary blobs unless they are forced into change.
AMD is finally changing. Unfortunately, The amdgpu-pro limbo right now is not ideal... but I am very excited for the future.
AMDGPU is already very usable. I remember ~5-10 years of waiting to use my Radeon 9600 with a recent kernel until the free Radeon driver was finally up to snuff. Catalyst and fglrx were awful.
Proprietary drivers just don't make sense. They are practically unmaintainable.
