It's apparent that some of the disagreement about costs cuts across the amateur/professional line. I would think a large majority of the people here are amateurs, or at least would not make enough money from photography to get the IRS (in the US) to agree that it qualifies as a business. (Basically, and crudely stated, the IRS wants you to make more money than you deduct to be a legitimate business. If you make $1000 a year on photography, and try to deduct $3,000 cameras every year, plus computers, office space and software, they will not be happy, and their unhappiness translates directly into repayments with interest plus fines, and, theoretically possible at least, jail time.) If you are on the legitimately professional side of this line, you get to deduct the software, which amounts to a savings of 15-40+%, depending on your income and how your business is structured.
The amateurs don't get that, so they pay the full load. And I think that's where a lot of the complaints come from -- the amateur photographers. And, I have no proof of this at all, but I suspect amateurs make up the bulk of Adobe customers, at least for some of their photo-related software packages. I've read that they don't really carry about amateurs, but if you simply sit down and put your thinking cap on, and try to figure out how many fully-professional Adobe-using photographers there, I think you'd conclude that the number is in the low thousands in the very largest art centers like New York and Los Angeles, with much small cohorts in other cities. According to the US Bureau of Statistics, for example, there are 56,140 people in the US employed as "photographers." I wouldn't think that would be enough to keep Adobe fully occupied...I think the amateurs are carrying the load.
