It's like $300 or something... but yes, the licensing terms of the comms library requires us to sell it separately.
I would press on figuring out why you need to power cycle the PLC. Get Siemens involved if needed.
The 1200 series is pretty underpowered when it comes to the built in OPC UA support, so if you're using 1200s in prod too, then it might turn out the Siemens Enhanced driver performs better, or at least allows you to access more tags than the couple thousand limit for the S7-1200 OPC UA server.