What possible advantage do subscriptions have for users over license upgrades? The incentives of license upgrades are much more tuned towards developers adding meaningful features, and also more tuned towards developers finishing development on a product when it is mature. Beyond that, license upgrades allow users to actually keep what they have paid for.

I'm convinced a major reason Adobe made the switch to a cloud subscription was because they recognized their products were maturing and the window was closing on locking in recurring revenue before the licensed product was so mature there would be little incentive for users to subscribe.