I'm a little curious, which was the original spirit of hb?
The original spirit was that everyone should be able to play the games without barriers. The first HIB had absolutely no authentication at all--you could openly download all the games for free, the URLs were not protected. All the games were open-sourced. All games were on every OS. And it was truly pay what you want, $0.01+. And I believe they also commented that for people who were, say, too young to have access to payment options they'd do everything they can to expand payment options and make it possible for everyone. And it was not being done to make a profit, but rather to bring exposure to under-exposed indie games. It was very much an underdog setup.
With increasingly regressive BTAs, forced minimum BTAs, the idiotic global BTA change, fewer DRM-free options, fewer OS options, no more source code, minimum payments for Steam keys, moving towards working with big publishers, making bundles that don't even contain good games and no real attempt to quality control, and now no ability to share keys that vision has been significantly curbed.
Some of these moves are consequences of various external factors, but most of them--and certainly the aggregate impact--has been a move towards making a profitable business. This is likely a result of the business development requirements forced on them by the venture capital they accepted to grow the service.
It's fine. They should just rename the service Bundle Store. It's not Indie as a rule, and it's certainly not Humble. That's fine.
