"Dirt cheap" is based on your own personal perspective. Casual/hobbyist users and office workers who have to dabble in graphic design tasks have a different point of view. Price comparisons with perpetual license software in the past is also a bit of an apples to oranges thing as well.
If it's for the office, it can easily be subsidized as a write off/expense, so that really doesn't hold much weight. For the casual/hobbyist, that may be true.
Many office workers and other amateurs gravitate to Canva for multiple reasons. It has a free version along with its paid, premium version. The app has a bunch of clip art and templates. It also has a decent collection of fonts. Non-pro users can bang out some graphics work using those pre-existing elements. The problem is the elements they're using are often a mixed bag of stuff that can cause time-wasting technical problems.
This happens even with the ones that are there with pro tools as well. Especially if it's for physical, non printed production. The odds my be greater for Canva.
Now Canva has another issue and that could also create other problems. It isn't a native app (not even the "binaries" that they have for Windows/Mac, those are webview wrappers) and by native, I would also include programs whose UI is all OpenGL/Vulkan (Blender would be the one that most would think about, it's all done on the GPU, it doesn't have the draw call issues as if it was doing what a game does, but it is all GPU Immediate Mode), in other words, non browser context programs (no Electron/Webview (although Webview is better compared to Electron, but that's another topic).
Now it being non native app, that means how it interacts with the file system, fonts etc are all beholding to the browser context. That's a big deal, although, I imagine that native desktop apps are going to go away. People just don't know how to code for them and we see even companies like MS moving more apps to web first and wrap it in Electron, so things are going to get worse.
I think $60 per month for a full Creative Cloud subscription is a pretty good value.
Now it's your turn with "personal perspective". It really comes down to what one values and at what cost one values it at. With what Adobe has become (more of a data company compared to a vendor for creatives), not really. This isn't even going into their business practices (which most SaaS after indulge in to some degree or another).
Bare in mind, when Adobe first started this, it was what 50 and now it's 60. No upgrade discounts, flat 60 (or whatever it will be later on) now until you stop needing it. It adds up, add in all the other software that is now SaaS, long term it's not sustainable.
There is more value for the customer (that's the key thing) in the old model compared to this one. They didn't do this out of the kindness of their hearts. And outside of 5.5 (I don't think of a point release as being a release that should be charged full price for, but I digress), I have bought the Master Suite every version (and only once was it the upgrade path, I didn't like how had to keep the older version, install that first and at that time install the upgrade if swapping out computers) and I had been an Adobe customer since the early/mid 90s.
But most non-professional users are going to balk at a $720 per year (currently) subscription price. CorelDRAW is a little less than half the price, but the "suite" has only two applications.
There will be people that will balk at anything, no matter what it is.
Usually if someone is serious enough to pay hundreds of dollars per year for something like Adobe CC they're going to put at least some effort in learning how to create production-ready artwork with it.
Like with anything it depends. I know plenty (even on here) that just though having a Mac made them a professional or that people were less of a professional if they didn't have a Mac.
It's a tool, it depends on the knowledge of the person that's using said tool. I think what has happened is that too many people are beholding not just abstractions, but sometimes they are hooked on very specific abstractions. Give me some of the basic tools, I can still do what I need to do and that allows me to move from one program to the next without degradation in what I'm able to do (ironically, sometimes I still actually have to use those tools, because the more automated ways still can't do it at the level that it needs to be done). Oddly enough, even if the other tool has an option that someone may need, sometimes it's done a different way and the person doesn't want to learn the new way, because they have done it the original way for 30 odd yrs. That's a them problem though.
But I digress.
