I made an uneducated guess about which add-on was slowing down Firefox for me these days, to the extent that I often have to wait minutes for a response from clicking on the tab or scroll bar. I have disabled that addin, and after a few hours of not having any problems, I re-enabled the other add-ins I had disabled. So far so good. I will give it a week and if I still don't have any problems, the add-in gets booted and I will tell you the name of the add-in. I don't want to jump to conclusions prematurely.

My second kneejerk reaction is this.

Consolidate a library of articles into kind of an article app store on one site (Google Play?), to faciltiate impulse purchases of 35 cent articles, similar to the way mobile app stores facilitate impulse purchases of 99 cent apps.

Maybe the only important thing about the refund policy is that there is one. The sales pitch should use words like a "eight article refund limit per week" instead of "abuse," and requesting a refund of the ninth article will just be blocked, and has zero chance of disabling your Google account (speculating here).

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In current form (controlled by the site owner vs app store), I could see the Wall Street Journal or somebody else with articles already behind a paywall doing something like this.