wordpad has always been gimped to keep it from taking any sales away from word. if microsoft wasn’t worried about wordpad, they would have tossed a spellchecker into it back in the 1990s (when wordpad replaced write) and it would, ya know… still exist (in upcoming versions of windows).
I suspect it was more likely that nobody used wordpad because, well, why would you? So supporting it is more pain than it’s worth.
I don’t think the wordpad to office pipeline represents quite the cashflow you’re implying
wordpad has always been gimped to keep it from taking any sales away from word. if microsoft wasn’t worried about wordpad, they would have tossed a spellchecker into it back in the 1990s (when wordpad replaced write) and it would, ya know… still exist (in upcoming versions of windows).