On the other hand the "we're professional products, you'll eat the cost and like it" approach worked fine for Adobe.
1: someone other than the user is footing the bill (bulk licensing)
2: there are no suitable alternatives
Adobe will fade (or be forced to change) over the next 20 years as different tools pick them apart one niche at a time. It's already happening: the Affinity suite, Procreate (and similar indie-focused tools), and DaVinci Resolve, among others already serve huge niches within the Adobe suite quite well. Capture One, which predates Lightroom, is getting better as it expands out of the portrait studio.
This is essentially what happened to Microsoft. Macs got good (for definitions of good that matter to non-enthusiasts), mobile swept up almost all casual computer usage, and the web took much of the rest by way of Linux and open source. It happened a niche at a time until the world outside was too big to fully EEE.
I know several designers from various areas who do serious attempts to free themselves from Adobe's bondage (in particular the running costs of the forced subscriptions) and are looking for (and partially have found) alternatives for doing their work.
If you let teenagers pirate your product, they're already familiar with it by the time they get hired. When they get hired, the cost to re-train them on something else is more expensive than the license (at least, in the short term).