My concern isn’t over the current price. The larger investment is my time. If I spend hours and hours learning software and creating things with that software, I don’t want to risk it being crippled or the price being raised exorbitantly.

I would rather use open source software or pay for software with a reasonable licensing model (and ideally from a company without a history of consumer-hostile practices).

That is very expensive for hobby software. For contrast, I pay about $50 per year for a Jetbrains IDE for professional use. That's software I feed my family using.

I'm talking about hobby in general. Let say tennis hobby, the annual membership cost alone could easily go more than 297/year.

297/yr isn't the cost of "the hobby". It's the cost of part of the hobby. Then you need machines, bits, and material to work with.

And it's unlikely that a CNC alone will be enough for anything, so there's a bunch of related tools and supplies needed.

It's like saying "a $300 set of clubs isn't too much to have golf as a hobby" but forgetting that you need to pay for all kinds of others stuff, too.

yes, i wasn't implying 297/year is the total cost of "the hobby". thats why i compare it to tennis membership, which is also only the cost of part of the hobby.

That's a limited time offer in light of their recent announcement. The standard price, and indeed the price when you have to renew, is $495 USD (plus applicable taxes).

Sure, but still for many people their hobby expenses could go much higher than that.