Ohhhh... So I was definitely missing something ahaha. I thought it was just a very beautiful text (it did resonate with me, the part about hours spent drawing fictional maps on graph paper).
Some vendors who sell expensive software arrive (perhaps unintentionally) at this solution: produce software with enough defects or missing features that it cannot be used without regular contact with support. An adjacent idea is to produce software with a large number of plugins that are separately purchased. That multiplies the effort needed to crack and distribute everything.
Great solution. Unfortunately only works on installations that support extensions, which excludes most managed database services like AWS RDS.
I like how you tried to track the standard as close as possible. I've seen (and written) ad hoc solutions that hard-code too much or mandate certain columns to be present.
That said, unlike the standard and most other RDBMSs, Postgres supports range types. Seems a shame to rely simply on two timestamptz columns when one tstzrange should suffice.