Adobe, what are you thinking?

I'm cynical, okay?

Adobe's announcement about the end of Creative Suite tells me just one thing: Adobe want more money.

They can put a spin on anything but they have a habit of not fixing their products.  They add features but they don't fix long-standing issues.  It's rather obvious with the Flash runtime that they aren't doing things correctly because there seems to be a new security issue almost every week.  They dress it up by saying "performance enhancements" but they know the truth and are unwilling or unable to tear things apart and make them work correctly.  They're like Apple or Microsoft, but worse.

Of course, there really aren't modern alternatives to Photoshop.  Live Picture was good and so was PhotoStyler/xRes but they're gone.  You could call Corel's Photo Paint an alternative, but it would be difficult to take it any more seriously than The GIMP.

I'm seriously considering getting involved in The GIMP.  The last time I tried it was painful and problematic, much like many open source-based tools.  If it could work as smoothly as a commercial tool, people might take it seriously, but it has to work on the creator's desktop (as a native tool, not as a well-yeah-i-know-but-it-works kind of software), as well as that of the print house's desktop.  That's a huge trick.

I've become so disenchanted with Adobe, and their decisions, that I'm barely a customer now.  That said, I picked up a copy of Photoshop Elements 11 (based on Photoshop CS5, apparently), just to have something a bit more modern than my Photoshop CS3, which probably isn't happy on Mac OS X 10.8.x.  (If that seems a crazy switch, I'll still have Photoshop CS3 on an older machine and I don't need Lab Color and I'm not sure who needs it these days.)

Update 2013.11.14: Adobe continue to send me e-mails, telling me that they've sweetened the deal, or they've got an alternative deal with just Photoshop and Lighroom, but if I don't need Lightroom and barely need Photoshop, what good is it to me?

I wonder how many others can get by without support for newer features.  I suspect it would be the majority.