I understand this perspective and sometimes I want to agree with it, but it requires some kind of competition/innovation/refinement process to exist. One time p

I understand this perspective and sometimes I want to agree with it, but it requires some kind of competition/innovation/refinement process to exist. One time purchases means the provider needs to entice you to upgrade one way or the other - compatibility with new formats and paradigms, better X, something. Subscriptions don't have that incentive once they're relatively entrenched as de facto standards. Granted, one time purchases also suffer from hubris at that stage (see unnecessary UX changes to Photoshop, Windows, etc.) but it's more obvious with SaaS due to the sunk cost fallacy.