I work in a creative industry, and Adobe going to a subscription model has been really helpful for us. Agencies like my own often wouldn't update to the latest version until months later, because the software had to be vetted by our corporate IT, and often we would skip entire releases. With the subscription model we get the latest version of the entire suite as soon as they release an update, which they do very frequently these days.
I get why some hobbyists aren't happy with this, but even before Creative Cloud Adobe wasn't really for hobbyists anyway. Wasn't a Photoshop CS6 license $999 by itself? You can get almost three years of Creative Cloud subscription at the $29.99 promo for that money, and that includes the entire software suite, not just Photoshop.
I make music as a hobbyist, and I honestly wish more music software would go the subscription route.
For anyone working in the creative industry or someone who has a company working in this industry, then YES, the Cloud is great, I wholeheartedly agree with you. You guys need to have the latest thing going and since there is no alternative, you are still forced to keep paying the ransom monthly, but you get a lot back for that.
As for most hobbyists, well there were a lot of hobbyists that were using Adobe Photoshop, However I did see a leaked internal memo from Adobe outlining their intentions of going rental by month and it was not what a lot were speculating, that it was to stop the hackers. Turns out that the new release of the Cloud subscription was hacked about 58 minutes after the official release. It was the money thing, a monthly rental they could force upon people.
They had considered the backlash of those refusing to pay a monthly rent/ransom, but their financial people showed that about 65% or possibly 70% were individual owners, so a lot of hobbyists in there, but 80% of their actual revenue came from corporate purchasers of their software. They knew many of the 65% to 70% were going to jump ship but they knew all their corporate users had to stay with them, so they could hold them to ransom and keep their 80+% revenue coming in now.
Because so many individual users were jumping ship, more than they expected, they reduced their monthly charge from their initial $49 a month down to $29, then a few months later they reduced it again to $19.99 and these were going to be for the first year of the Cloud. But they still had so many leaving that they changed it to a Photoshop only rent of $9.99 a month with no limited period, which is where they are today, but they also threw in Lightroom now as well.
As for getting the whole suite for the corporate rental that is great but hardly any individual user would need that, so it is a waste of money every month. It would be like car makers all saying we no longer sell you a car. From now on everyone must pay a monthly rental to own a car, BUT, you can now use our SUV model and our Truck and our 19 wheeler and our Motorcycle and our Unicycle, and the Fire Engine we build, so see what a great deal we are now offering you??? As you can imagine, almost no one needs all those things to drive, they just want to have their car back, or their truck back, or their SUV back. And that is no longer possible unless you pay the monthly rent.
I also own the Adobe editing suite but I hardly use it and have not used it for over two years. I can click on it this afternoon and again in a week from now and it has not cost me a penny more than when I bought it, to use it again and again. If this was on the Cloud under CC, I would have had to keep paying out every month these past two years in order to be able to use it when ever I wanted. So that is why so many have risen up again the forced rental system. It was the majority of the users that were not happy, not the majority of income generators, although many of them were not happy but still have to keep paying the ransom because there is no other option for them now.