4DS - Anything but Charting, page-28375

Maybe it is the tuneability that provides a clue on why we might get top dollar?

4DS or the acquirer can fulfill the licensing obligations by asking WD what characteristics they want for their chip. WD might provide a list of specifications which 4DS meets by tinkering with its cookbook. No more, no less. Whether that then allows WD to compete effectively in their chosen market is up to WD.
Other use cases / markets can be fulfilled with tunes to the recipe, leaving the acquirer with one customer and other potential untapped markets.

Let's make the above a bit more concrete with a hypothetical example. Say WD wants a product for data centers that processes complex financial transactions that have many simultaneous inputs and outputs feeding into each other (eg financial derivatives). It might need a memory chip that is as fast as DRAM and retention for maybe 2 minutes. 4DS takes the order and creates the recipe for WD which WD manufacture in its own fabs (say, to only pay licencing fees to 4DS and no more). This would fulfill the licensing obligations. WD can still ask for more recipes to which they will pay more licensing fees. This does not exclude 4DS's acquirer from creating recipes that is better suited for AI applications, gaming applications, streaming applications, lower cost but fast retrieval storage options, rowhammer solutions... etc.

To an acquirer, there might be an appeal here because this is a ready source of income, and it does not limit the acquirer from other use cases. It provides a competitive incentive to think of new ways to apply the 4DS technology. We essentially invented the equivalent of flour and not just a singular product. There are countless ways of applying this technology to solve problems across the tech spectrum.