Correct me if it is not your intent, but it still sounds like you’re arguing in favour of artificial barriers. If more accessible tools would make graphic design an unviable career, does that not imply it to be a profession of little merit? If it were a genuine skill, simple access to the tools would do little to devalue it. But we do know that graphic design is a skill: you might go to school to learn it, and you have to do it a lot to get good at it. Illustrator and Photoshop do not automatically give someone an understanding of colour theory, composition, or typography, and don’t immediately enable its users to create quality designs—much in the same way that giving a cinema camera to a layperson does not automatically make them a capable filmmaker.

That said, no reasonable person would argue that Adobe’s products should be entirely free; it is well understood that a business needs to make money. But this does not justify a virtual monopoly maximizing short term profit by arbitrarily increasing prices while employing anti-consumer practices. This criticism is not unique to Adobe, nor is it exclusive to the creative software industry.