Adobe's stock price sure hasn't gone downhill. It has been on a steep uphill climb ever since the debut of Creative Cloud. Their stock price was fairly stagnant before that. I wish I would have bought some stock in the company back then.
They have also been buying up more and more product as well. Getting into more things (more in the 3D realm it seems) and they are taking the big fish of those parts. Substance suite being the big one that would affect me (although if you get it from Steam, it appears to still be the traditional license, and they have maintained the Linux version it appears as well, which I'm surprised). That has helped them as well. There isn't much competition in that regard. Armor Paint, is really the only one that I know and while being open source, it does still cost (but a whole lot cheaper compared to Substance Painter. Can't forget to, I believe that they have cloud marketing analytics (gotta love telemetry) that they get a good bit of scratch from as well.
Adobe painted themselves into a corner by going SaaS. The folks shelling out money every month expect value in return. In my opinion this leads Adobe to do stupid things and release buggy "updates" to justify their business model.
It has become more iterative and not so much innovative (not that it is totally devoid of it, just not like it once was and that isn't surprising given it's age, which also feeds into why going into the subscription plan as well). People have gotten overjoyed with some updates that have been asked for years or decade(s) even. There are two methods of still staying relevant. New features or buy other products to expand that way. Both only go so far for so long.
I have a feeling that legacy files and not really wanting to learn a new software package, that may have the same features, but just performed a different way (not all the time, sometimes it's still not there, but I have to wonder how much has to do with learning new software) are the biggest thing. But also can't discount the whole "get what you pay for" mentality that isn't always true. More often, it probably is (at least 51% of the time) but not always.
Here is the thing, Adobe pulling stuff at their discretion and the user having to lump it regardless, that's just par for the course. Regardless if they were or were not the instigators that led to them pulling those files out of the program. The joys of being on rolling release software. And this is the joys with any SaaS type of software. Have to realize that no software vendor writes 100% of their code. Some blob of code is licensed out at some point. Can see those that require attribution usually in the Help->About [Program]. Not all are there, sometimes when paying for the commercial license, don't have to mention that it uses x code in there. For the end user, it really don't matter who instigates the process that gets a blob of code that they my use from getting removed.
I have to wonder how many people are going to see about pulling those old color swatches and see if it can be just dragged and dropped into the new version. Do have to worry about them getting dated, but that may not bother some as it would others. Only real downside is that probably have to repeat this process with each update as each update will probably look for those files to delete. Of course, does it report that it is still having to delete those files when it does the update as well? Again, gotta love telemetry. This as been a long time coming and end users have let it happen, can't logically go crying about it now.
