I'm sure a lot of people left Adobe when they went with subscription model, but I also believe that the subscriptions more than make up for whatever money they lost from defections. That's why Corel is desperately moving in that direction, and so is every other company. Not just software. Every kind of company is trying to figure out how to get people to send them a check every month. Heck me too!
11 billion this year so far
I don't think Corel became a "casualty of their own success." Rather I think the company and its software has been a victim of micro-management from venture capital parent companies who really don't have any expertise developing graphics software. With Vector Capital selling Corel off to KKR (another venture capital company) I'm not optimistic things are going to get any better. For all I know various applications and other properties in Corel's "portfolio" may get spun off for cash.
I don't know all the behind the scenes decision making that has been done with CorelDRAW in recent years, but I can't help but suspect the move to a yearly full version release schedule was pushed by people at Vector Capital. It smells like something "suits" would cook up. They did this despite the fact CorelDRAW and other applications in the suite were already very mature.
Even on a 2 year development cycle between full versions 2010's era upgrades of CorelDRAW could be fairly underwhelming in terms of new features. With everything accelerated to a yearly schedule that just compounds the difficultly to make one version of CorelDRAW stand apart from the other. The Windows version of CorelDRAW 2019 is not much different than CDR 2018 -other than CDR 2018 is more stable. So, yeah, the development team has even less time to root out bugs.
I disagree that Corel (or its new parent company KKR) should acquire Affinity and somehow incorporate it into CorelDRAW. They just need to be able to fix and properly maintain what they have, as well as study what is unique and good in rival programs and try to match it. I've been using CorelDRAW for nearly 30 years. But I've also been using Illustrator for 27 years and have used a few other drawing apps over the years. None of these applications have 100% feature overlap. None of them are 100% accurate at importing art files made in rival software.
I also own an iPad Pro; the only reason why I bought it was for the Apple Pencil. It's great. I don't use Affinity on the iPad, but use a few other apps (Adobe's "mobile" CC apps, Vectornator, ProCreate). An iPad is not a substitute for a full fledged PC (or Mac). Even the iPad keyboards are missing some important keys one needs for certain functions and shortcuts.
While it might be awesome for CorelDRAW to have an iPad counterpart I think Corel should stick to the traditional desktop. I think Corel's development team is already spread way way too thin as it is. Throwing in an iPad app will add even more of a burden. And the mobile thing is a big slippery slope that will make the suits drool like Pavlov's dog. It won't be enough for them to just have an iPad version of CorelDRAW. They'll want Android too for those tablets or for it to work on a freaking Samsung Note smart phone.
Corel and Adobe suffer from the evolution in the graphics industry. Profit margins in design for a myriad of reasons, many being poor technical ability of designers is very low. A large percentage of work never sees output on paper, vinyl or any other print.
I have a client that spends $25,000 on Adobe licenses that has hired me to do an audit to reduce their application costs. Moving to Adobe alternatives is an option too bad CorelDRAW is no longer in the game.
Preparing myself in the event that Corel sells off CorelDRAW or produces another fiasco like 2019 I have been looking at the Affinity products again and as long as it's web based and your output standards for print are low it's ok. But for a diverse work flow color management is a joke. You can forget quality CMYK in Affinity Photo, luckily for many users today's print standards have long slipped below cutting edge.