> There's absolutely no reason why the client software can't do the calculations that the server is doing to "optimize" cutting...
Well, there is one reason: the cloud is more powerful. A computationally heavy task can run locally, but if uploading to the cloud and sending the results back is 10x faster, most users would probably prefer that. However, the best way to solve that (IMO) is to by default do local computation and have a subscription for cloud access.