SonicAlbert said:
I think there is a certain satisfaction and comfort level from "owning" the tools you work on. Coming from hardware, where we all were even just a few years ago, the "owning" experience is how we did it. From that we went to a "license", which is all we really have when we use pretty much any commercial software. But the smart companies make the license feel and function essentailly the same as owning. "Subscription" is the next step and I think feels different from owning or open-ended licensing.
Subscriptions are the final step towards pissing off so many musicians that they find themselves replaced by free, GPLed plug-ins. Waves should keep in mind just how distasteful subscriptions are to their customer base and turn back while they still can. There's no such thing as an irreplaceable plug-in, nor a plug-in that takes so long to rewrite that it wouldn't be worth it for many developers, given a high enough price tag....
The only way I would ever pay some sleazy software company for a subscription to software is if the lifetime (for my lifetime) cost of that subscription was less than the purchase price (or maybe slightly more to account for the fact that I typically do a paid upgrade for commercial apps once on average, generally resulting from a massive change like an OS change).
The problem is that, like most people, I rarely, if ever, go out and buy an upgraded version of an app because of new features; if the app did what I needed before, it still does, and if it didn't, I would have bought a different app or waited until it did. Subscriptions are an attempt to force me to pay for the limited sales of the company's product. That's what I despise is that it is an attempt to force the customer to basically pay for the fact that only one out of ten of their users paid for the software to begin with.
What I don't get is this: if these companies wouldn't make their software so overpriced, they would drastically improve the sales-to-piracy ratio. Most of those people who pirate the stuff are people who don't use the software commercially and can't afford to pay five prices for plug-ins. If the software cost a reasonable amount, home recording enthusiasts would buy it in droves. If they cut their price in half, they would likely sell three times as much. Cut it to a fourth, they would sell ten times as much. It just amazes me that these companies with such poor understanding of supply and demand stay in business at all.
For that matter, why can't you buy pieces of the Waves bundles? There are one or two plug-ins in each bundle that look interesting; the rest are nearly perfect duplicates of plug-ins that I already own from other companies. I'm not about to buy $350 in software just to get the $50 worth that I care about. The marginal utility is nowhere near $400 worth. It's $50 worth. If they would part it out (and not use iLok), a -huge- number of people would buy some of the individual plug-ins in a heartbeat!
IMHO, the level of piracy they experience is karmic justice for their incompetent (bordering on criminally negligent) marketing (pricing, bundling, etc.). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. It's a classic case of ignoring the fair market value of your product and price gouging because you think the software is too ingrained in some people's setups for them to change to a competing product. Eventually, such companies have a tendency to collapse like a house of cards. Yo, Waves? Buh-bye. Dead man walking.
I didn't pay that much for it, but that's how much it would cost to replace it. 
I dunno about that cheap hardware route, there is no compressor I can afford that is better than their LA2A plug. I couldn't even come close to building one for the $150 it costs. And I know I can't possibly beat the 8 or 10 Pultecs I can run simultaneously for $100.