One thing they got right is the licensing (AGPL + commercial license).
If Nova folks adopted a similar scheme it would make their product much more popular. And it is because of popularity I may choose to pay for a product.
Yeah as a laravel dev, they definitely priced themselves out of the market. There's really no reason to use this... I mean find a good theme like VueA for admin, add in a bunch of custom things you use like logs/etc... create a boilerplate, and re-use it in all your projects, not hard...
Especially if you can't test it and you need to believe them it works as expected (it probably does, but it's not always the case with other Laravel admin panels.)