I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.
Pay per click is also user hostile. We’ve all accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or, especially with touchscreen devices, clicked when we didn’t mean to. I really don’t need my misclicks costing me a bunch of extra money.
Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol
Right. I've been a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud for almost 10 years now - which means I've paid them upwards of $6,000 by now - even though I only use 3 programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) and even then I only really use base-level functionality that's been present in those titles long before they became subscription-only: if it weren't for (normal and understandable) platform-obsolescence (high-DPI support, support for new formats/codecs, etc) then I'd still be happy with a boxed edition of Creative Suite I could have bought for $1200[1] back in 2013
I haven't tried any of those suggestions, regrettably; as I've heard good things about them.
But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.
