It's more about ensuring people don't have to wait 5+ years to start using changes that are already finished.
On our side of things, it's also much better to get feedback on a handful of changes when they're still new and we can focus on them.
At the moment, with 13 just released, we're getting feedback for an enormous number of changes at once, some of which were done so long ago we are no longer familiar with the details ourselves without looking them up. If someone reports a bug in the new version that doesn't have an obvious explanation, we have to consider thousands and thousands of code changes to work out what might have caused it, instead of it being narrowed down to just the recent ones.
Just reading all the feedback is taking up a lot of time at the moment, let alone acting on it. The feedback is great, don't get me wrong, but we could respond to things much quicker if it was spread out over lots of smaller releases instead of a big one, and if it was only a few days/weeks since we wrote the changes rather than years in some cases.
So moving away from huge releases should improve quality as well as speed of delivering new features.
Under the old system there were still feature updates that changed things, quite significantly at times. There has never been a LTS type version of Opus, and I don't think it's what many Opus users would want.
After each major release, many of the early updates would be like mini new versions. But then, after a while, our focus would move to the next major version and the features for the current version would become smaller and start to dry up as we were holding back the bigger changes for the next major release.
Now we'll keep doing those "mini new version" releases without holding anything back for a future version, since there's no reason to.
Random examples:
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Dark mode has been finished for over a year.
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The example FAYT scripts I wrote to test that functionality when it had just been written are dated 2021.
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The changes to file copying a lot of people asked for were finished about five years ago.
If we were already using the new model, people could have been using those features for years already.
The new model doesn't change that either way.
Old and new: You keep the software you've paid for if you decide not to buy any further updates.
Old and new: Prices could increase.
We could have jacked up the price of Opus 12, or the cost to upgrade to 13, instead of keeping it the same number it has been for years (i.e. a price decrease, factoring in inflation). We didn't.
The new model also gives you more predictable and transparent pricing, since you no longer have to guess when the next major release will be -- which varied wildly between versions -- to understand how much you're getting for your money.
I understand the fears about any kind of change like this, as well as reactions to the word "subscription" (because of Adobe's awful, abusive business model, as well as the recent trend of small do-nothing phone apps or even single-task websites that demand you pay $30+ a year for something that looks like it took a weekend to write and has no ongoing work put into it, with functionality that would barely even be a bulletpoint on Opus's feature list; or companies that put out a new "major" version every year and demand loads of money, but the change list is literally 5 items and you wonder what you're paying for). But I think we've proven that we are not here to fleece anyone; we're here to make a great product and grow the userbase rather than take advantage of the existing users.
And if that ever changes, you'll always be free to keep the version you own and stop paying us money, as it should be.