So all the efforts by you and 'mem' to deride the product, is really like water off a duck's back for me - but unfortunately other readers will believe your input.
Although its nice to know that Boeing and the Military can fork out $99 for a compiler.
Most of us are hobbyists doing this for fun (with minimal budget) and not major companies however. 
I'm not sure how you calculate the limit as being 14k of GCC code.
If your taking the blink example and comparing the sizes then your way off.
There is about 1K overhead from the Arduino libraries but after that GCC will be the same size or smaller.
I highly doubt you'd get the basics of the Wiznet chip or anything else reasonably large going with the Bascom demo.
A basic echo server is 8k compiled with GCC.
Nothing against you personally but you do have a conflict of interest in this matter.
If your a complete newbie and all you want to do is flash LEDs or use the premade libraries then Bascom will probably do just fine.
Anything else more complex and you'll be missing the community support, the user made libraries and you'll definitely hit the code size barrier.
GCC on the other hand is completely free, is superior to most commercial compilers (cant compare with Bascom directly) and has great community support everywhere.
Not to mention that the skills learnt with it are usable in other areas of programming with minimal fuss.