If people were pirating Photoshop only because it was easy to pirate, my guess is when it came to professional work or another occasion where they had the funds to pay for image editing software, they would overcome whatever friction necessary to buy the best. That definitely happens in other cases like video editing where easy to access software is different than what studios pay for.

As a thought experiment: if Photoshop was means tested and free to anyone who couldn’t afford it, would that actually convert users when they had money?

How many people ever got rich enough to pay for a copy of WinRar?

I think this is irrelevant. WinRAR's core feature set for most users was made available for free with zip files and operating system support.

The US government is one of WinRar's biggest customers.

I grew up on pirated windows, and never had the opportunity or means to pirate Mac software. I now cannot stand the mac software - alt tab is broken (for me), as are copy / paste. I think piracy had a huge involvement in my preferred software.

Remapping the command key to alt is a pretty straightforward feature built into the OS.

I think they were likely referring to the behavior and not the choice of shortcut keys. On Windows, alt+tab switches between all open windows across a apps, whereas in macOS, you have separate shortcuts for switching between apps vs windows within the same app.

Personally, I find the macOS behavior really irritating and unintuitive, but thankfully there are plenty of apps out there that solve this issue so it's not really a problem.

Interesting — I didn’t think about the difference and could see how it is annoying.

10 year old me didn’t know this. I’m comfortable enough with windows (and anything other than mac) that there is zero chance I’ll switch to the OS or their key layout, which I will concur is superior.