I've been paying for Creative Cloud since day one (BTW... It works offline too!). Honestly, it's worth it, especially since I started out with Photoshop, ended up learning Dreamweaver years later when it was still owned by Macromedia, moved onto InDesign, fiddled with Illustrator, and now work with After Effects and Flash 15 years later.
You know what hurts Adobe the most? The fact that most people who have been doing any image related work over the last 10 years has made most of their profit using Adobe products, yet have never gave a cent to them for the software. And that Photoshop is *probably* the #1 most pirated program (and torrent) in the world.
When your $600 dollar product is seen as freeware to the masses, you have to do something about it, and that's why they went the subscription route. They'd rather lose out to someone like Corel, then have people freeload off their work.
We're in a era where no one wants to pay for software, and it's sad that people think that just downloading it illegally for free is perfectly OK. And it was bad that people would ALWAYS get the latest version of Photoshop when it came out, looking for ways to crack it.
Honestly, why continue to allow 16 year-olds to dilute the industry with low paid work?