Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12. IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer to the ground rather than use that again.
That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?