I don't want to start holywar here, cuz it's pointless, as it's actually war of philosophies. May be you don't understand it, but in professional programming choice between compilers/IDEs/frameworks - isn't about philosophy (i.e. when you personally think, that compiler X is better, than compiler Y). It's about plain result. Delphi suits my needs, Lazarus doesn't. Plain and simple. And I have source code, I've been developing for years. Some code is 15 years old. Converting it to Lazarus - is about completely redesigning it and writing it from scratch, cuz Lazarus lacks several major features, like closures and runtime packages. And this means loss of time and money. IDE also isn't as good, as some people here say it is. For example GDB is terrible for assembler code debugging and I need it very often to optimize my code.
You know, Delphi vs Lazarus - is like MS Office vs LibreOffice for me. Back when I was working as CAD programmer and had to write all documentation in Excel, I tried to migrate from MS Office to LibreOffice. And, it wasn't only about simple fact, that due to some philosophy reasons LibreOffice programmers have stuck in 2001 era (like some Delphi programmers, who've stuck in D7 era) - it was about simple fact, that LibreOffice was messing up all my MS Office documents and I just couldn't do everything from scratch, cuz it meant two years of work scrapped. I.e., yeah, may be if I would start working with LibreOffice right from the beginning - everything would be fine, cuz I would get used to it. But at that moment neither I had time to fix all this problems, nor my boss was ready to pay for it.
So. What do I try to say. If Lazarus's major goal - is to provide free alternative of Delphi, so Delphi developers would be able to migrate to free platform - then currently it fails to serve it's goal. I can't migrate to it, cuz I would need to do lots of work from scratch in this case and nobody will compensate my losses.