Interesting- I'd much rather pay the perpetual fee.
At home, I run a 13 year old Mac Mini in my studio. Everything DAW related on it still works, and it's all compatible with each other. This is quite common in many studios I've worked in. It's not unusual to be running 10-15+ year old machines. Everything is updated as far as it's ever going to go on that hardware.
I do like the Jetbrains model where there is a perpetual fallback license. It think that would be a good balance for software like DAWs.
That setup is using an Apogee Duet Firewire. I had an original digidesign mbox (USB 1!) hooked up to the Mini before that.
The original Duet stopped getting driver updates a few years back. For a while, apogee had a trade-in deal if you sent them your old firewire interface, but then I would have had to update hardware + software to support it.
The last update I did was OSX from 10.11 to 10.13, and this was partly to keep some of the project work synchronizing with dropbox.
At this point I'm kind of just keeping this system alive to get through my latest project and observing the first few years of Apple Silicon before I build a new system.
At home, I run a 13 year old Mac Mini in my studio. Everything DAW related on it still works, and it's all compatible with each other. This is quite common in many studios I've worked in. It's not unusual to be running 10-15+ year old machines. Everything is updated as far as it's ever going to go on that hardware.
I do like the Jetbrains model where there is a perpetual fallback license. It think that would be a good balance for software like DAWs.