My utopia would just be a single reasonable paid service that provided everything. I pirate because its simply more convenient than 20 subscriptions.
Should be able to search all instances. If you know what instance your community is on, then you’ve already found it so… why search?
Unreasonable? Depends on what you consider reasonable. Yes absolutely they would try to exploit the users, in which case we go back to piracy. Perhaps a better solution would be federated content providers with some sort of combined (reasonable) fee determined by the providers collectively. We get one system to subscribe to, and pay one fee.