I mostly agree with you. I think there is one thing you are hand waving a bit though. When you bought version X, you could use that forever if that was sufficient and your cost basis and value proposition to upgrade was known and you could personally amortize it. The problem now is that the subscription can jump from a reasonable $5/month to $40/month for literally no reason. You have sunk time adapting to their tooling and have no ability to just do the one thing you started out doing. Sure, you can switch to another tool but that has a different cost and lots of them have moved to similar models. These kinds of subscriptions can really feel like a bait and switch. The example you cite above sucked more for people who needed each new raw format for camera Z but was great for all the people who didn't care.