Hey, I'm the dude currently in charge of managing the server license system since about 1.3 I think. So let me answer some stuff.
The license was introduced before my time but the reasons have been stated more then once here why it was introduced and kept. So let's not continue that discussion.
I'm probably one of the strongest advocates of keeping the PR development team out of server management. Hence we don't force server rules, don't run our own servers, don't have our developers have admin powers on servers, etc,... So any argument that we want to control the servers is wrong. The only times we have intervened, and blacklisted servers are when for example they are stealing custom content, are threatening with attacks against other servers, manipulate the playercount or asked for money for unbans. Those are some of the reasons I can think we have done it in the past.
We have also forced however all license holders to be cooperative, share scripts, information, tutorials, tech support each other, hackers information etc and other information on their own little forum. This just shows that a license also have many benefits and causes natural cooperation between the servers in a small community like ours. We do very little to make that happen, the servers just do this because they see a need for it. They are nice people
I think since v1.3 I likely haven't denied a single server license application. The only ones I have denied have been once where I noticed it wasn't a dedicated server but somebody trying to run a local server. Something we don't allow.
You can also notice that the license system has nothing to do with which server gets populated, pretty clear by seeing how many empty servers there are. We don't promote a server or dictate where players go. Player supply and server supply have always been off in any game out there. There will always be empty servers, our game is no different. A license system or not doesn't do anything here.
As for server modding. We have a shitty old game with a shitty old server browser. We have a very hard time to show to a player what a server is all about. We have a servername, that's it. We can't show to a player if a server is hardcore or casual, or a training server, or has somewhere in it's map rotation a custom map. We don't have any tools to have players on server join download any custom content running on a server. All we have as a tool is 2 things:
-PR mods: You are free to make a copy of PR and make it custom. Actually it's not allowed, but we can always say you can if you are nice

But our license strictly speaking doesn't allow you to mod PR

Ironic isn't it. It's true that we are protective of our stuff

But if you do make such a mod, and we support it, your mod will have it's own serverbrowser, making it clear to the player who downloaded your custom PR mod to only show servers that work. This is also how we distribute things like BETA versions of PR:WW2. Such mods we don't often see cause we allow already so much with passworded servers (see below) and it's just a massive amount of work. And there is rarely a point for it.
-passworded servers: this is the only way we can show to a novice or experienced player that a server is different. That it is custom. And we allow everything here, custom maps and content, we offer an extended costumizable server setting file (see the many events being run atm running extremely custom gamemodes). We aren't garry's mod or counterstrike cause our engine isn't as easy to work with. Valve build those games with modding and custom games in mind. DICE didn't. Big difference so stop comparing the two.
So I think you are just not educated enough on how we do it, and are too often comparing to other games that aren't even close to comparable to us. We have been doing this for such a long time, that you aren't even capable of making a dent in history regarding this. So I really don't see the point of having this discussion in the first place. There really isn't anything that's going to change with the current PR Team and server admins. The only people complaining ever about the license is those who think I should ban every server they don't like or those like you who don't understand it.