Right now Adobe is a true monopoly. For at least the past 2 decades they have bought absorbed and dismantled every other package they could.

The only real weeds growing in the vacuum are FOSS.

Anyone who is fine with new policy great. If you're not... the only thing you can REALLY do about it get involved in fixing it.

http://www.blender.org/
Total 3D package that rivals Maya, 3DS, Lightwave, C4D, or anything else you can mention including Zbrush. It is also a powerful video editor to rival Premier, and has advanced motion graphics tools the rival After Effects.

http://www.gimp.org/

2D Paint and Image processing program that offers a good deal functionality from Photoshop.

http://inkscape.org/

A vector art App that offers functionality similar to Illustrator.

http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus

Page layout software to compare to InDesign.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

An audio processing program that offers most of the features available in Audition.

Adobe is phasing out Flash which is a mixed blessing.

Adobe took an awesome little animation program and crow bared their Macromedia Director Presentation Software into it to form a complex monster that only programmers loved.

The closest project in the FOSS environment is:

http://www.synfig.org/cms/

Development has been V E R Y S L O W, and I haven't tried it in a while.

Dreamweaver and Muse currently have no real rivals. So if your main interest is Web Design you're kind of stuck with Adobe.

But if you do want to leave the art world and “code your own”... here's some options.

http://www.bluegriffon.org/

http://quanta.sourceforge.net/release2.php

http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit

http://getfirebug.com/

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/Overview.html

Competition is the key to true capitalism. The failure of the capitalism that eventually someone wins, or a group of competitors come to an arrangement as outlined by game theory. You get a Monopoly or an Oligopoly. That is when you need an organized response to limit the power of that group. A Government,

Adobe doesn't have any true competition any more. There is no need to appeal to the consumers desires because they are pretty much the only game in town.

This hodge podge of hobby applications is all we are going to get because there is no government intervention allowed in the “free” world.

mo·nop·o·ly  [muh-nop-uh-lee]
noun, plural mo·nop·o·lies.
1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market,
or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices