The Flickr Pro account 24.95/yr for "unlimited storage" was an easy purchase. When you login with your Pro account you are suggested to downgrade to the new 1TB (ad) account.
For 49.99/yr I have to ask myself, do I really need this ? what are my other options.
However, if I were signing up for an account today, I would most likely not purchase a paid account - my main reason for paying for an account was to get past the "only your last 200 photos are visible" limitation. That said, if I actually used my flickr account for business purposes, I would not hesitate to pay $50 per year to remove ads from my photos. I suspect many professionals would agree.
I would imagine, at that price point, it would drive people to use multiple accounts despite the irritation -- and that ultimately, because of that irritation, they might leave the service. Not a good situation for anyone.
And you'd find it quite hard to leave a service after you've uploaded 1TB of data to it..
A while back I was getting nervous about what Yahoo was going to do with Flickr, so I signed up for a $60/ year SmugMug account.
On the technical side of things, transferring the data out of Flickr wasn't a problem at all. If I remember correctly, importing ~9000 (~42 Gb) of photos from Flickr took less than an hour, and preserved almost all of the meta-data I had in Flickr (sets, collections, tags, etc.). It was so fast I almost didn't believe it. Of course 1 Tb would take a while even at that speed.
The bigger problem is getting people to use the new site. My Mom, for example, still goes to my Flickr page.
If you are such a heaver user that you need more than 1TB of space, you are unlikely to want to split your account into two and your would probably be unlikely to balk at spending $500 per year on what would be for you a business service.
It's a very, very small number of people (though they certainly exist) that have photo libraries of > 1 Terabyte. And, and an almost insignificant number of people who have 1 Terabyte of curated pictures. (I.E. Eliminating Dupes, Poor Composition, Focus/exposure issues, etc...)
Flickr as backup doesn't make sense - backblaze, at $50/year, makes a lot more sense. Perhaps this is Flickr's way of encouraging people to start using them as a curated upload site, and not as a backup of their entire photo library.
The bulk of the people who want to host 2 Terabytes of Photos will be fine paying $500/year, those who aren't can create multiple accounts. (Those who just want Local+Cloud backups are probably better served by just buying a 2 TB Hard Drive for $90, and backing up with backblaze for $50/year
Stats are gone anyway with the new account types.
I suspect you meant MEGAbytes ;-)