Creative Suite has evolved leaps and bounds since 1991. It has even evolved leaps and bounds in the last 10 years alone. It's strange to me that someone who really uses Adobe's products would say such a thing. Creative Suite is the only one in the game because it's SO good that there isn't a chance for a competitor to step in. They are also constantly adding new tools to the suite at no additional cost.
As for DAWs, I happen to produce music and have used most of the major DAWs over the last 15 years, though I've settled on Ableton Live. I have zero problems with VSTs crashing, and I often run projects with 50+ VSTs running simultaneously. Stolen VSTs can have stability issues, of course. Hardware dongles are also fairly rare. Only a handful of companies use them, and they aren't really a problem at all as long as you aren't in the habit of stealing software. They typically install in the USB port, not the parallel port. Parallel port dongles were used by Steinberg and were phased out long ago.
I'm curious - what DAWs in particular have you used, and which VSTs are you having problems with?
As a designer I can tell you Serif is doing great things already. Affinity Designer is a solid Illustrator replacement, most of my printed work for clients comes out of that. People are excited about Affinity Photo and Publisher, which are Photoshop and InDesign replacements.
Not to mention UI/UX which is pretty much dominated by Sketch, with very few people using the Adobe equivalent (Xperience Design or whatever it's called).
The biggest issue is compatibility though: the vast majority of teams exchange files in .psd, .ai, .indd which are proprietary formats, so there's lots of reluctance to change and difficulties collaborating if someone uses a different thing. It's a bit like Microsoft Office versus all the other formats, open or not.
http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-sof...
I only know about guitar pedals, but aren't a good portion of these analog through and through?
http://www.rolandus.com/blog/2014/02/14/analog-circuit-behav...
A fun true-analog synth which is pretty fun for a reasonable price is the MicroBrute: https://www.arturia.com/products/hardware-synths/microbrute
(If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)
1) From interviewing a lot of producers and plugin developers, our findings show that there's a bit of a vicious cycle with pricing: most hobbyist producers aren't willing to shell out the money for plugins, so they opt to pirate them instead. The plugin developers lose out on a ton of sales, so they hike the prices up to make up for lost revenue. The hobbyist producers continue to see high prices and therefore continue to pirate plugins, and the cycle starts all over again. :)
2) Most paid plugins don't offer trial versions, and when they do, they're always crippled and DRMed in some form or another. When there's no trial, users don't want to make the leap of faith and buy the plugin, and when there is, the aforementioned crippling/DRM can be quite the hindrance.
We're shooting to make the user experience better on both of these fronts by offering a more modern marketplace - you still get a nice store to browse through and read about plugins, but one of EQIP's value adds is the ability to instantly demo the full version of any plugin on the spot right within your session (and our technology's secret sauce prevents anyone from getting their hands on either the plugin or the audio).
The next step in our gameplan is to offer bundled subscriptions for plugins; you might think of Splice's rent-to-own, which is a great offering, but the pricing model is on a per-plugin basis - we're looking at various tiers of affordable pricing for access to X number of plugins depending on the tier. This way, a producer can have unlimited access to several plugins they like for one low cost (and rent-to-own can easily be added to this, we're still working on the pricing for the time being).
I hope that was a helpful brief rundown! There's a lot more to it - if you'd like to chat, you're more than welcome to email me, my email's available at my personal website (also in my profile). :)
For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991.
For music, DAWs are not that bad and there's no single monopolist like Adobe, but VST system is stinky and stuck in times of Windows 95. People are buying hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port. Also, everything inside is complete black magic and every supplier of software pretends that there are super secret algorithms everywhere. Every oscillator and filter is super-secret and super-unique and there's no articles in the open how to design "decent" oscillator and filter. Medival times everywhere.
And these tools should be designed for users, not Entertainment Content Production Corporations.