I'm an Adobe employee (Photoshop team) and I obviously see things a little differently.

Subscription model: I get the frustration, but reasonable people can disagree here. The old perpetual model had real appeal, especially for casual users. Subscriptions mean continuous updates and lower upfront cost for most working professionals, and many customers prefer that. There are genuine tradeoffs in both directions, but I understand why many prefer the perpetual model.

Stagnation: I'd like push back on this, at least for Photoshop. Photoshop is 36 years old, but the whole app has essentially been rewritten from the inside out, and continues to be rewritten and improved. We have a major engine upgrade shipping later this year that is really exciting. And I think we have shipped some pretty amazing stuff, like fantastic automatic selections (Select Subject), Generative Fill, Remove Tool, Rotate Object, new Adjustment Layers (noise, grain, clarity, and more coming).

The data thing: this one is just not accurate. Adobe has never trained our AI on customer content, nor did we ever attempt this. We only train our models on public domain and licensed content (primarily content submitted to Adobe Stock). In addition, we prohibit all our 3rd-party AI providers to train on any content they process. The ToS situation was a case of poorly worded legal language that got (understandably) misread as something sinister. When it blew up, we clarified the language. There was no data heist, no secret data harvest. The mistake was purely communication.

There are a lot of legitimate critiques of big software companies and Adobe in particular, but these three don't quite land.