God no. Subscription has the opposite problem that the publisher is incentivised to keep changing the damn software underneath me. It means I can't decide "this version works fine for me, I'll just keep using this for the next decade", which is something I totally can do with Sublime.

I agree, but with the option to keep whatever version you had when you stop paying the subscription.

Maybe applying only after a N consecutive months with an active subscription, to prevent paying for a single month behaving as a lifetime purchase.

This is what JetBrains does. They give you a perpetual fall back licence to where you were 12 months ago. More info: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...