I've looked a little at Qimage, and it has two major issues compared to IP (it is cheaper, and as such, worth looking at - I just haven't gotten around to a thorough test, but I mean to). One is that the Mac version is a bit of a stepchild compared to PC - for many years, it didn't even have one, now it has a feature-incomplete third-party port. That port is likely to go away with Apple Silicon Macs (I have NO inside information here, just guessing because the port is a bit half-hearted).
The second differenceis that ImagePrint is an enormously research-based program. John Pannozzo of ColorByte has been involved in inkjet printing from the very, very beginning, and one reason ImagePrint is somewhat expensive is that he's forever trying to squeeze the most out of the hardware. Qimage is mostly a collection of off the shelf tech (not entirely, they've done some work in resizing).
That doesn't mean it's not valuable, and, as I've said, I mean to take a closer look.
As for the price of ImagePrint, yes , the old Adobe perpetual licenses were massively expensive (and came with ~30% ANNUAL upgrade costs, with huge penalties for missing one - skipping one version meant that the upgrade went from 30% to 50-60%, as I recall, and skipping two meant no upgrade at all?). I didn't mention them because that hasn't been the case for years.
As a percentage, ImagePrint's upgrade cost IS very low - the relatively expensive Capture One offers a choice of subscription or 30%+ annual upgrades. Most other raw converters charge roughly 50% for annual upgrades (on a much lower baseline). Adobe is subscription-only, which you can think of as 100% annual upgrades (although they lowered their baseline cost significantly when they did that). 30% or so every two or three years is much lower than any of those.
Dan