On one hand there's iA Writer. I don't even remember when I bought the app -- five years ago? seven? ten? -- and I'm still getting regular updates for it. It has maintained and iterated on its core feature set while keeping up with macOS updates. The dev team even added thoughtful new features -- like Wikilinks, frontmatter support, and authorship tracking -- without turning the app into something it's not. At its core, iA Writer remains a fast, bare-bones, distraction-free Markdown editor with beautiful typography that feels as Mac-native as you can get.
This is the sort of experience people are looking for when they say they want to "own" an app.
On the other hand there's Scrivener. I bought this app during the pandemic, and almost immediately regretted the purchase. The UI looks dated in a bad way, like an old Mac OS X app from 2010. It's full of a million chunky buttons and colors and gradients, creating a ton of visual noise. It's updated maybe once or twice per year, mostly to fix bugs and maintain compatibility with newer macOS versions. Their aging file format doesn't work properly with any cloud storage service except Dropbox, and they refuse to do anything about it. Even if you use Dropbox, it's very easy to corrupt your projects if you forget to manually sync them before opening them on a different device. The iPad app looks like it was built in the early days of the device, and has bizarre implementations of basic controls (like tree views) that behave differently from how you'd expect. It's clear that the dev team behind Scrivener has given up on the app and are keeping it on life support.
I think there are more Scriveners in this world than iA Writers. Or you have apps like Sublime Text, where every new version requires you to pay for a fresh license. At that point, you might as well turn it into subscription software.