> There is very little marginal cost when software is concerned so metering isn’t even reflective of the costs of using a product.

Well that's my point, isn't it? Neither are subscriptions. The transaction is presented as for a service, but you're really paying for a workforce that might not be providing any marginal value to you at all.

> Metering leads to reaching local optimal states at best, and makes it very difficult to reach a global optimal state.

I don't see how subscriptions are more likely to get us there. Certainly closed-source software (or paying for access to a closed-source service) makes it much harder to find globally optimal states—we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over again, which is tremendously inefficient and presumably would be a problem you'd expect market forces/technological progression to correct.