No doubt, I agree VRay is a fantastic product. When you compare the competition is stacks up very well in terms of quality, speed, and ease of use. Mental Ray is a joke for GI animations, and only recently stopped crashing all the time. There are other more serious renderers, but none that match the overall balance of VRay.
I think Chaos should charge more than they have been. But they have to do two things… One is keep the base price high and lower the render node cost to avoid flooding the market with low-ballers and keep prices reasonable for everyone. The other is to handle this transition gracefully, especially for existing customers. The upgrade costs to get render nodes should be much lower, to ease people into it.
I still think per node pricing is a step back to the 90s. Everybody has moved away from this. LightWave had the sense never to go there, and it got them a very big userbase of medium sized shops. There are still tons of them, though nobody likes to mention they use LightWave, as it’s not “cool.” Meanwhile the LightWave shops continue to make money and keep expenses low with no per-node costs and a great renderer that is wicked fast (don’t know about for Arch-viz, but for VFX… Sucks for character animation, though).