I am surprised to see your comment about bloat. If anything, the fact that you only ever got paid again for a major update, and an update HAD to have whiz-bang features to sell, that was what contributed to so much bloat. Think of how many home users needed anything that was added to Word from 1990-2000. By contrast, to keep subscribers happy you don’t need new features, you need to continually keep the experience great. That means judicious adding of things people really want, but also NOT adding crap just to add a bullet point on a box. And NOT “ruining” the app by screwing up what people like about it.

> Unless you release paid updates, which is what a number of developers do.

This just introduces two more user complaints: those paid updates are very likely to either be not consequential enough to justify paying, or to add bloat. Presumably, when you bought the app, you were satisfied with the functionality it already had (and indeed if they make big changes it often gets hate just for the disruptiveness). But my point is software costs money (time) to support, forever. And once a product (especially a specialized one) has already found most of its buyers, that means the developer has every incentive to abandon the app because maintaining or updating it is never going to justify the cost. So yes, a developer doing your preferred model absolutely must have a half dozen apps, which will be at various stages in their life cycles, but only the apps that are new, and have a chance of growing their user base further, are going to get any maintenance, attention, and updates. The mature ones will be left to wither even if they are widely-used and popular, because there aren’t enough new buyers.

The other part of this is that besides just maintenance, many modern apps have a server-side component which needs to be paid for forever. It’s basically a pyramid scheme if your only source of revenue is new users and they subsidize the lifetime access of the earlier buyers. It will collapse eventually.

As for “files” — that’s really not the primary type of application I am talking about here. If you are making an application that authors proprietary documents, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a free reader to exist whether you have an active subscription or not. However I think that’s maybe 2% of the consumer software market today. I think the only files that I can think of on my computer that aren’t standards-based formats are Pixelmator files and TurboTax files (though I stopped using that and use a web-based replacement).

> since maybe I don't feel I need any updates and I don't want to pay for them,

The updates I’m talking about, which you “don’t want to pay for,” include “making the app continue to run on a current OS”