I'm curious if this new model will even cut down on their support requests or if it will continue to be an issue.

While the new model did increase prices/set limitations on licenses there was nothing that I saw that limited support per user after a purchase. The same individuals that are apparently "chewing through support" are still going to be able to do so.

Following this logic it would seem likely we'd see more price rises in the future would it not? So in this instance I would agree that creating some type of forum system and really encouraging users to help each other (despite their data) seems like it would be more beneficial.

I would hazard a guess that even the people opening mass amounts of support tickets would venture onto a community like that considering they probably know how long it takes a ticket to get serviced; of which after days and days it usually takes another 3-4 rounds of back and forth to hammer home what your issue is before it might even come close to getting resolved or they send you off to contact the plugin developer (yup that has happened to me).

If it were me, I'd reopen the community forums, following what Bill mentioned above (assign moderators and provide incentives to those mods for continued efforts), I'd then look at not limiting the number of installations/updates (let them keep their unlimited updates things NEED to get updated regardless) but the renewal fee would be based around the amount of support requests /year that can be submitted (not referring to bug reports either). Not sure if that is naive sounding or not from a business perspective but as I mull it over I can't see why it wouldn't work.

75nineteen.com actually has something similar to this for a few of the small extensions on their site. It appears they're selling the product as "support licenses" with options such as "no support, three, two, and one requests".