There you have another reason: the pricing needs to account for those who prefer paying with devtools coupons.

Does DRM exist for typefaces?

The shapes of a font cannot be copyrighted, trademarked or patented. The name can be trademarked. The code itself for the font is copyrighted.

Careful what you say about copyright. While this might be true (up to some degree) in the USA & Japan, it’s definitely not true in many other countries (e.g. Germany, France, Russia & the UK).

In the US it might also be possible to protect a font design with a design patent, so even there you should be careful about assuming it’s safe to copy a font’s design…

Is this enforced to any realistic degree? For example, is something like Arial, which is a clear derivative of Helvetica permitted?