I haven't even learned one tenth of the features in CS3 yet. And yet, surprise, surprise, I seem to do just fine. More feature bloat as far as I'm concerned.
This line of reasoning seems rather lacking.
I guess I can't win against corporate greed, and since they have no REAL competition after buying Macromedia, they will keep getting away with these outrageous prices for upgrades.
But frankly CS seems cheap at the price. $500 - that's probably what 5 hours of your time costs to your employer, the amount of time the new CS features will save most professional users means it'll pay for itself within weeks if not days.