Well, how is your freedom to study the toaster restricted?
I have experienced that really understanding how a program works withouth having its sourcecode is practically impossible for me. Your skills might of course allow you to also understand programs without seeing the source, and this also would explain why I would value this partial freedom higher than you.
First of all, you can't know that the source code corresponds to what you in your toaster. So even if you have the source code, you can't really know that the toaster does as the source code specifies. You can't even check that they are the same.
I find that `experiencing' how a program works is just a simple matter of using it, and duplicating what it does in some fashion. You don't really need to poke around in assembler listings, or whatever unless it is a device driver.
Cheers.