>Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?

Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting professional artists working on complex assets and not a grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple" probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for much worse quality.

>What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them.

I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a smooth migration, especially when working as a team.

It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.