It would be great if AXIOM without a license allowed for acquisition, with an IEF license just internet artefacts, and then AXIOM gets you what you get now.
That's not a bad idea, one thing that would cause issues with this is that AXIOM and ACQUIRE don't have all the same acquisition methods. For most logical methods they're pretty equal but ACQUIRE doesn't include recovery images for Samsung devices, LG passcode bypass, and Samsung bypass with MTP to name a few. There are a few smaller advantages to having the paid tool over the free one but even then maybe we can build out a way to have it work similar to how other tools have done computer imaging without a license.
Also, whilst I understand that the backend is updated with each release, I don't think things like IEF Timeline are going to be improved with the same vigor as AXIOM's GUI.
You're likely correct in that aspect, we'll do artifact updates and bug fixes in IEF so if you find anything wrong or not working correctly, let us know, but as mentioned in the previous post, you'll likely seem more of our development time spent on new analysis features in AXIOM over IEF simply because if we tried to do both, both tools would hurt from a lack of resources.
Hope that helps clarify a few things.
Jamie