At my wits end: about to end my twenty year association with Adobe

Question

Last month, while travelling overseas, I was unpleasantly surprised to have my Mastercard declined when trying to rent a car... after talking to my bank it transpired that the card had been cancelled due to concerns over the recent security breach at Adobe. I had to pay to have a new card couriered to me in Europe.
On returning I found that my Creative Cloud subscription had been cancelled because Adobe could not get a payment authorised on the credit card number that had been compromised by their bungling incompetence.
No worries, thought I, I'll change the credit card number and all will be fine and dandy. No such like - there was no option available to me on the website to update my credit card details.
So I tried the support live chat... no real joy there... the rep initially wanted to fob me off with apromise of a callback "within 24 hours" - now I don't know about anybody else, but sitting by the phone for 24 hours waiting for it to ring is really not an option, so eventually he agreed that someone would call within the hour.
Someone did call back, then after taking my credit card details and processing my payment I found that I still could not access any of my CC apps. Eventually a "technical expert" was summoned to remote into my machine - he played around for a couple of minutes before deciding that it would not work for 24 hours... as I was still talking to the phone rep I told him this was unacceptable... a half-assed workaround was suggested that it may be possible to install PS CS 6 - after establishing that this would require uninstalling CC, downloading 6, installing it, and then reversing the entire process the next day, and having been promised that everything would definitely be working normally in 24 hours, I decided that would be more trouble than it was worth, and I'd just wait until the next day.
26 hours later - it's still not working. Any app I launch drops out telling me I need to renew my subscription. I can see in my Plan Information that I have two CC accounts under my Adobe ID - a free one and a year subscription... the free one is clearly overriding the one I have paid for, showing me 2 Gb cloud availability and only allowing me to download trial versions of Apps.  So I call support. Clueless rep with very difficicult to understand accent complete ignores what I tell her about this and starts her script to trobleshoot my machine. Has me exit CC, log out, log back in, and still PS tells me I need to renew my subscription... PPro behaves the same... we log out and log in again, no help, reboot my machine, still no help... she then has me move my hosts file, no help, and put it back again, then has me uninstall PS CC... then has me download the Adobe cleaner tool. then run it, and then after hearing all the options available tells me to take the quit option instead of actually running it...
Then we change permissions on a bunch of folders so that everyone has full control of them instead of just me, despite my protestations that I am the only user on the machine and an admin with full control permission already. Needless to say that fixed nothing.
Next we uninstall all my CC apps - at her insisitence I also have to clear my preferences... I'm far from happy about that, but have no choice. The we run the cleaner tool again, and again take the quit option since she didn't like either of the options available. Then we download the CC app and I'm unable to download anything but trial apps, Her next guess was to turn off my firewall and AV software, again not the slightest difference.
At this point we've wasted over an hour already and got nowhere, so I ask her to escalate it to somebody who might have a clue what they are doing. After a long pause she tells me that the response time will be 72 hours... unacceptable, I ask to speak to her supervisor... he tries a couple of other things and then takes my number, reads it back and promises to call me by 3:30pm eastern time (Yesterday afternoon)... no call arrives and I then have more useful and exciting things to do than worry about graphics software. At 7pm I get an email from Adobe claiming to have called my old telephone number, not the one I gave the rep, and only got voicemail.... I responded to this email immediately via the support portal requesting a callback at the correct number, however no call has been received.
I have now lost three days work because of this issue, whihc is all basically down to Adobe's security breach in the first place. I had serious reservations about the subscription model when it was launched. This episode has confirmed all of my worst fears. Adobe is clearly unable to manage and support the model effectively, and I am stuck here unable to do a damn thing until they get their act together... very unhappy and about to start exploring alternative software

Answer 1

@Britkev: I feel and understand your grief. I was a long-time Adobe loyalist since version 3 of Photoshop, and have since then used (and taught) pretty much all their applications in my professional and personal work. At some point I was an Adobe Certified Expert for four of them (PS, ILL, IND, Acro).
18 months ago I decided enough is enough - even before the termination of the perpetual licenses I foresaw where Adobe was going with CC, and I opted out before things would escalate.
Since then I have switched to other tools that are just as powerful or an improvement. Reading all these miserable accounts of bad Adobe customer support and CC related problems unfortunately only confirm my initial doubts two years ago.
It's a crying shame - Adobe used to be a company I really enjoyed being a customer of - now my CS6 installation lies somewhere on my hard drives collecting dust. Well, I use it as a conversion tool sometimes to convert legacy files to ones I can integrate into my new workflow.
As an instructor I now advocate the use of other software to my students. Something I couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago.
And I now I am not the only one. I think it is important to take a stand against this type of digital serfdom. My fear is that other companies will follow, though. I will continue to refuse to become a serf, though - even if I could subscribe to CC for $1 for the coming 10 years or more. It's about the principle. It's about choice.
Apologies for the rant: I just feel that CC is the worst thing to happen to this industry.