The crazy thing is, I’m not even opposed to paying a subscription for quality software that I get a lot of value out of, but increasingly Adobe CS is not that. For over a decade now they’ve been cramming in features for features’ sake with little regard to actual customer needs.
I would not hesitate to subscribe to a version of Adobe CS that is more or less feature-frozen at CS1/CS2, with all engineering effort and subscription money going towards bug fixes, optimization, adaptations for modern OSes and hardware, and code correctness. Can you imagine how insanely good Photoshop CS2 would be today if they’d spent all the time since its release working on those things instead of endlessly tacking on mostly useless gimmicks!? Its stability and performance would be a moat unto itself.