So you stopped with VUE 15 years ago, which was 8 years before the subscription model was introduced. But yet, you feel entitled to imply that the software stagnated throught the 13 versions which were released since then. Of course, not having looked at the tools during all that time, you're the perfect one to judge.

And oh boy, we were all so greedy. I prefer perpetual too, but subscription does not automatically equal greed. VUE xStream and PlantFactory Producer as the highest version cost 4000$ as perpetual licenses if you got both. The non-commercial subscription versions for private use with the full xStream and Producer feature set were priced at 200$ for a bundle of BOTH, which is 5% of the original perpetual price and 8$ per month for each product. But, oh we were so greedy.

And then PlantCatalog, with 250$ for more than 250 species in up to three different versions per species. That's less than 1$ per species which you could export and keep forever. And if you count the procedural shape presets built into each plant, with sometimes more than 200 preset shapes per species, that's  0,005$ per model. But oh, we were so greedy.

And to top it all off, we gave everything we created away for free now in our endless greed, because we never cared about the community and our users at all.

I hope you have fun with the free versions, and may you think about our endless greed whenever you use the products that we poured our heart and soul into and for which you had to pay the crazy amount of 0.0$ to now use them forever.