How much of that is because they have been conditioned that things should be free though?
We have 10+ years of Google, Facebook, and others handing out major tools and functionality for free because of the privacy invasion.
I have to wonder how things would have looked had that not become the norm.
As far as being purposefully made worse, yeah both apps do that. Grindr charges $100, Scruff charges $120 a year. Considering how popular both apps are I have to assume they are pulling in quite a bit of money.
Dating apps also suck at giving compelling reasons to pay them unless the app is purposefully made worse so they can sell the functionality back.