Modern-day patronage is kind of different from a subscription. It's a lot like a "pay what you want" subscription model, but people seem a lot more generous when you express it as a "donation with early access to premium articles" rather than payment for goods and services.

Yeah, as long as you remove the "for-profit" part, it's essentially that. Once it's a for-profit business, it perverses the incentives, and it'll be a race to the bottom or a race to see what subscribers can survive the highest prices, which is exactly what we wanna avoid :)