Way back I had a BT address @talk21.com and as a BT subscriber for telephone and internet it was free. Then they announced that they would start charging. I have a similar attitude to e-mail addresses as I do about parking and bank accounts: I do not want to pay if a satisfactory free alternative is available. However, rather like you I suspect, I preferred to keep the address so I did not have to change/notify everyone along the line. Also, I did not like the idea of using the services of international conglomerates with the "freedoms" North American laws, practices and attitudes allow. Then BT "migrated" to Yahoo and by making talk21 an increasingly less attractive option were "encouraging" people to do so with them. So I paid at first but intended to pick the right time to drop BT's e-mail service in favour of something I would see as a long term solution.
The time came when I got the opportunity of tagging onto someone else's server and formed my own addresses for different purposes. My serious beef with BT is that as they deactivated my talk21 addresses they did not do so in a way that any messages sent to them would "bounce". This meant that nobody was alerted to these addresses being invalid and since their messages apparently went out and were successfully delivered they waited for my reaction. This is contrary to what usually happens and I found BT's practice "pants".
Sometime well after this I had such a pain dealing with BT, basically due to their avaricious marketing practices which (at least then) were constantly changing to squeeze ever more pennies out of unsuspecting customers - one had to be really alert to watch the notifications and the small print tucked away within them. In the end I gave up and moved to other providers altogether.
In short, I sympathise with your sentiments both on BT and the "standard" providers. If you are prepared to pay what is not a huge sum annually then you might like to consider startmail.com. Good luck.