Mildly Infuriating

Because the 1200$ paywall they put behind the physical editions

From what I understood, that's the price of used copies of the second edition these days, not how much it cost when it was actually published. I have no idea how I could estimate what's the objectively appropriate price considering the funding, expenses and the production costs of such a dictionary, and I think neither do you.

particularly the SOED has some of the most well put together definitions of any dictionary for casual lookup

So you want SOED, not OED. SOED doesn't cost $100 a year, it's available as an Android app that costs a one-time $30 payment.

If your reaching for one the logic should be that you want the best/most accurate and descriptive one possible, no?

Not necessarily. OED's entries can be so massive they're difficult to navigate and follow, and the length of the definition doesn't necessarily say much about its accuracy. The definitions in ODE and SOED are frequently more clear, perfectly adequate and faster to access and read through, e.g. if you're reading Shakespeare or Milton and just want to quickly find the word's meaning without all the additional scholarly apparatus distracting you. At least, such is my experience using dictionaries.

I strongly agree both with the idea that science should be freely available, and that it should be available as a local copy (PDFs, etc.). I also made my opinion on academic pricings in general and OED's price in particular clear in one of the previous comments. I know full well that they're not the only option, even in a capitalist society (many continental European academic institutions and Academies publish their major dictionaries, comparable in complexity to OED, online for free). The only thing I disagree with is singling out OED as if it's doing something particularly unprecedentant and almost heinous.

They likely don't want to publish it on CD or similar locally available (non-online) format because it'd easily get pirated. But, I say, maybe people should organise and pirate the existing database themselves.