Most of us are presumably adults who can afford to pay for things when they're convenient. That's what it's about for me, convenience. If you're not making it convenient for me to buy your thing fair and square, then I'm gonna pirate it.
As far as uni workflow goes, I don't know what you do, but LibreOffice worked just fine for me in college for papers and such. Sheets is definitely inferior to excel if you're doing serious spreadsheet work, but Writer works perfectly fine as a Word clone for simple word processing. My professors never commented on it.
What's with the title?