I’m not clear why you feel you are stuck with SU2015, especially if you are a student with access to our low-price ($50/yr for everything we sell) student license? Maybe I need to hear your about your particular situation. Regardless, you are free to continue under your existing license terms if that is what you want to do. Subscription is indeed one of your multiple options.
There’s a lot to unpack in your post, and I’m not sure, really, where best to begin. Maybe I can just say that I do get it, and remember being a student as well- living in a cold-water East Village squat in the late 1980’s while I was working my tail off at Cooper Union. Actually, we usually had hot water, so it wasn’t that bad. I did eat a lot of ramen noodles, though.
Broadly speaking, I don’t think we are asking you to do anything you don’t want to do, nor working in bad faith against your best interests as a designer using SketchUp. On the contrary, what we have done is offer a subscription for SketchUp Pro as an alternative that includes more stuff for a lower initial price. The break-even price comes after 3-4 years (depending on how you value the features/services beyond the SketchUp core application). If you don’t like that for whatever reason, you are free to continue using SketchUp under it’s previous (“classic”) licensing model. But you shouldn’t think you’re getting a better deal by paying once and never upgrading again. You’ll be missing out, eventually.
I don’t know how much it matters, but we do think differently than you seem to about subscription licensing. From our perspective, we have to earn your business over and over again every day you are under subscription. With perpetual licenses, we only have to convince you to buy once to satisfy our business model. The way I see it, a subscription is good for you because it keeps our performance as a team aligned well with your ongoing happiness. If you aren’t satisfied, you can cancel the subscription and move on to whatever alternative you find to be more satisfying.
One thing is for sure- a software company that isn’t continuously improving its products is a software company that isn’t built to last very long. That continuous improvement represents a continuous cost on our side to keep the programming team fed, housed and working hard for you. Additionally, more and more of our products depend on cloud computing services that we have to pay to keep warmed up and available to you when and where you want them. We simply can’t afford to sell access to those services under a perpetual licensing model.
You’ll no doubt argue that you didn’t ask for any of those things to be built and that you don’t care about them at all. But the reality is probably different- I think you’ll actually find them pretty useful in the long run.