If you have a "nerdy" problem you can probably get someone to write it up as a research paper and then it would easily fall under the academic license. To some extent, if you're buying a commercial license you're just paying for secrecy.
Plus, the setup is really fucking annoying... The number of times I had to reactivate my academic license of gurobi while in uni...
The speed is totally worth it though, literally orders of magnitude better than any alternative for wide problem classes. Plus the bindings are good enough that you rarely ever need to drop into c++
If you can't even get a random member of any degree-granting institution (could just be random research staff, a student or adjunct faculty) to take some interest in your optimization problem as a subject for publishable research, does it even qualify as a "nerdy" problem?
This is not true: to get an academic license of Gurobi, you have to be a member of a degree-granting academic institution (otherwise every person could easily (illegally) get one):
> https://www.gurobi.com/academia/academic-program-and-license...
"You must be a faculty member, student, or staff of a recognized degree-granting academic institution.
[...]
To activate your license, you must connect from a recognized academic network."