Before Creative Cloud became subscription only, you could budget the software as a one-time fee; $2500 for their entire suite of software, $600 or so for just Photoshop, iirc.
With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.
Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).
... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.
Sounds like you're saying graphic designers no longer need Adobe and if they do need it then they probably gain a materially benefit from it. I never suggested Adobe products were cheap, or a good deal.
With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.
Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).
... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.