Gosh Matt, I thought I was the only one that thought this way! Are you by chance left handed? I was kind of in charge of all the Macs for a group at a Gov’t Installation, we had about 8 Mac users in the early 90’s. I had a limited budget, so I used some sort of license sharing program that allowed everyone to have all apps installed although we only had a few licensed versions of some; it let only that many people run that app simultaneously. I don’t think we ever ran into conflicts. We had both FreeHand and Illustrator, and by far FreeHand was more powerful, gave better results, and EASIER to use. I guess the money was just too good for them to sell out (I think the developers are now doing DiskWarrior, at least it’s the same name). But these comments let me know I am not the only ‘retired’ person that can’t justify the Adobe Suite monthly dues due to only occasional use. One program I have seen, I think a database app, only charges you during actual use, seemingly a better subscription model, but the learning time could be expensive. I too never went down the subscription rat hole of expense, especially since I had a fully paid for version already, why rent? I differ, I think, from most here in that as I sit, I have both a Mac IIsi (with a 68040 daughter card), and a G5 tower, at arms reach, both fully functional, so yes I still have a working copy of FreeHand, and typing on a 2015 MBP, the wife unit one room over has a M2 MacAir. My MBP has the SS-HD partitioned, with a small one being Mojave with mostly just the Adobe Suite. That IIsi also has a copy of Full Impact, a spreadsheet program developed by Aston Tate that I thought much better than Excel. It had 3D plotting capabilities that you could rotate (before Excel even had 3D looking 2D plots), I think the first app ever (on Macs or dos/Windoze) to have a ‘ribbon’ or tool bar (all editable), a separate scripting language that was close to Pascal instead of lines of the script being in cells, and a formula format that was readable and concise, like =A&B instead of Excel’s =AND(A,B) (and I think the program fit on a single 1.2 M floppy!)*. Sadly Ashton Tate sold out to Borland, all for the dBase family of products, all other Ashton Tate products were shelved and not sold off to others that wanted to buy them. So with this Affinity family, and Apple bring out FileMaker again at an affordable price, I think there is hope for amateurs, with limited budgets, in this microcomputer world.
*When IBM came out with the IBM PC, using DOS, I thought it set the microcomputer industry back at least 5 years, as there were much better OS’s out there (OS 9 comes to mind, a UNIX clone), how the suits at IBM let some young Gates, with little formal training, do their OS beats the heck out me (I’ve heard the stories, but there must be more to it). This Word and Excel @%^$ team that put much better products on shelves sealed my thinking. I’ve never touched DOS or Windoze unless I actually had to, and only by force (my dead fingers?). As I got use to Macs, in the lab where we had DOS computers, I, one time, accidentally put a space in a file name, and had a heck of time correcting that mistake as no DOS utility would/could ‘see’ the file. I actually had to use a disk editing program to change the 20 hex byte written in the directory sector to an editable/seeable character of the OS. Ever come to think, as the Apple II was out before the IBM PC, why those users never had to worry about Y2K, ever hear of lack of forward thinking at Microsoft?