Controls have to be put somewhere, and networked interfaces mean fewer physical controls that may be difficult to access, tampered with or fail. Having a standard control protocol means interfaces can be changed and improved without modifying the hardware. They’re not a bad thing.

However, having networked controls exposed on anything other than private, air-gapped, wired-only LANs seems rather foolish, to me.

I don’t know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.

Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn’t want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.

These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don’t work with the file formats required, or they just don’t cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they’re great, I love them. However, I’m not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.