The Adobe Marriage is Over

Question

Just want to put this out there. In the ancient days, when a husband and wife were through, the man would publicly say to his wife, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.", three times, and the covenant was broken.
I've been faithful to Adobe since pre-Photoshop 6 days. I've bought and installed and used almost every Adobe brand at one point or another for my business, from Audition to Lightroom to Premiere to Illustrator and all the little in-betweens, dealing with glitches and reinstalls and patches and system hangs... I've upgraded all of my computers, spent thousands keeping up with the latest hardware and graphics cards, RAM, you name it, just to stay in a relationship with you.
All these years later, after such a long relationship, I have to say I've been duped one too many times. I'm no longer faithful to you because you are no longer faithful to me. I'm no longer drinking the Cool-Aid. Chalk it up to too the $$$ lost in production, the minutes and hours that just slip through our hands in forums, the one-too-many support tech's telling me, "You know, you just need to uninstall everything and run a clean sweep." I Especially liked the guy last week who told me through his many sighs and his short impatience that I was basically not worth his time.
This morning I've retrofitted my computers back to CS3, after spending almost 60 hours this week, just on you, in the middle of our Christmas rush, sifting through forums, talking on the phone with Adobe support, getting nowhere while my clients wait. There's no more time for counseling.
I won't bite anymore, Adobe... I'll use your product, your older product, because I have to. but my affection for you, my desire to understand your ways, has been leeched away.
I'm tired of being your guinea pig. I don't know who you're catering to these days, but it's not the little guy who hold you up, the guy in the trenches trying to keep his trade afloat and support his family in a spiraling economy.
And it's my fault. I readily admit. I bought it all, hook line and sinker.
I should have used the money I spent for CS4 to give my kids a better Christmas. I know that now, on the other side of a cold and blue, Scrooge-of-a-shoulder. I'll take that responsibility. But...
No more.
No more.
No more.
Like I said, just want to put this out there...publicly.
Today I have to use Photo Mechanic to filter through my images. Then I have to use Bridge CS4 to color, and finally, now, back to Photoshop CS3 to edit and tone my final images. It's a hodge-podge just to get the job done. (p.s...just googled for the first time ever...'best photoshop alternative')
On to Christmas, and enough of the Bah Humbugs. There are brighter, more important things. Eternal things. And Thank you! Really. You've been a perfect example to me that all things are truly just passing away.

Answer 1

I agree wholeheartedly with the OP, but it's not about the pricing issue. It's about the fact that Adobe increasingly rushes products to market without fully testing them. They limit their beta testing to a select group of power users who, because they are advanced users, don't use the mundane tools that everyone else does. So we get things like a trainwreck called Photoshop CS4. Any Flash users out there? Flash CS4 is by far the worst release of Flash ever, in terms of bugs and stability. And, unlike Photoshop, the Flash guys cling to the old Macromedia culture of NEVER issuing patches to their software.
So what did I get for my money in so loyally and eagerly upgrading to CS4? Photoshop which works like molasses on a winter's day. Flash which has numerous new tools geared to animators (like me), along with so many seemingly small but serious bugs that it is LETHAL for any animator to even touch that program, and which any average user would have detected in beta testing. Fireworks has plenty of problems. And, well, I never use Illustrator. But my core apps - Photoshop and Flash - have cost me not only money, but time on these forums, time trying to convince Adobe engineers to work on bugs, and huge time lost in projects that failed because of software bugs and had to be rebuilt from scratch in older versions of the software (I'm talking mainly Flash here; I can't even begin to use Photoshop CS4).
Then I read way too often, on this forum and the Flash forum, posts from Adobe people blaming hardware, blaming third party drivers, blaming the OS. And suggestions like "reformat", dump your anti-virus. On the Flash forum, the Adobe response is mostly, "We deny there is a bug", but open a support case. So I open a support case and all I get in response is awkward workaround solutions, not any acknowledgement that there is a bug. What a piss poor attitude.
I don't blame Adobe engineers. Clearly if they can fix bugs, they will, if they're given the chance, and there are a couple in particular who participate in this forum who are sincere in their efforts. How long until Adobe executives see no financial benefit in paying their engineers to fix problems past a certain point? Someone else above said Adobe can't always bat 1000. Why not? Why shouldn't they? Their products should be perfect. Would auto executives say, "Oh well, can't always be perfect" if "only" 1 percent of their buyers were killed or injured because of a manufacturing defect?
I have been warning every animator and artist I know to steer a wide path away from any of the CS4 apps. I want to spend my time creating art, and using excellent software tools to help me...not doing workarounds and refiguring hardware and reformatting and trying to compensate for Adobe's errors.
My marriage with Adobe is over as well. I'm going back to Photoshop CS3 and Flash 8, the last truly stable versions of those programs.
I read that Adobe is having financial problems because sales of CS4 have been lower than expected. Good. They deserve it. No one should buy their latest products, period.