It's a pity f-droid doesn't support payment, and doesn't seem to aspire to being a full, polished replacement for Google Play for the average consumer.

I would've thought lots of people would be willing to pay the price of a coffee for a well built open source app, without the hassle of building it from source or downloading APKs from dubious sources, then having to manually update them.

And many average consumers would be willing to sign up to a user-friendly marketplace, with reviews and a polished UI, which promised much more curation than Google Play.