Same here. I think a lot of my clients can easily afford the price of the subscription, but many of them like to buy something and be able to keep using it for a long time with out needing to pay for a upgrades they don’t need or want.
I’ve looked at Form-Z, Blender, and Rhino this week. They all have api’s that look pretty powerful. SketchUp without the Ruby api would be useless to me.
I really hope that SketchUp uses the extra money (no it’s not a less expensive way to buy) to make a better product. Something simple like HTML panels should have been added long ago. Also an extension API for Layout would help, by allowing developers to make it into a useful tool.