Irony indeed.

I don't think it would be that hard to enable some features in Enterprise edition. I would love to be able to buy a few of the high end features, partitioning, mirroring, compression, on a per instance basis. Even if I had to pay $2k for compression it might be worth it for me on standard edition (after the $5k initial price) instead of going for $25k, which might not be affordable.