Former Adobe evangelist here. In my opinion, what you said about headline features is the crux of the matter. Under the subscription model engineering&#x27;s only job is to make the user happy, so they can focus on performance or stability when needed, but when you sell a new box each year their main job is to make sales happy, with new demoable features. The result is always bloat.<p>Whereas the &quot;cynical attempt to milk money out of customers&quot; angle is, IMO, not nearly as relevant as people expect. I mean, everything a for-profit company does is an attempt to milk money out of customers in some sense, so when Adobe (or JetBrains) sold shrink-wrapped boxes I assume they set the prices at whatever their models showed was the maximum people would pay, and presumably they chose the subscription prices the same way. I expect it&#x27;s much of a muchness.<p>As for the SaaS stuff (storage, etc), I just see that as little extras that become possible once each install is tied to a user account, so the company tries them out to see if they work. But it&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re supposed to be so amazing that they justify the switch. (views my own, not those of my former employer, etc.)