I used to work for a company that mainly used the paid version of sublime, and I agree with you that the price tag of $80 is to much, but to be honest when I used the free version of sublime I didn't really notice very many differences.
Then biggest one that I missed was being able to have sublime automatically upload my saves to another drive for redundancies, but I usually push my work to GitHub after I'm done so not that big of deal for me at least.