that also brings up another issue, not everyone needs or wants the entire adobe collection of applications, eg where I work, we only use Photoshop, Adobe premiere pro, and adobe audition, so comparing the cost of the subscription, to the master collection will not work for us and I am sure it will not work for many other people also.
Due to the level of video editing done, other than the mercury plaback engine it was nearly 7 years since the last time an update offered anything truly beneficial.
The creative cloud is only useful for the person who has to have the latest versions at all time whether they directly need it or not.
I also do not think it has much to do with piracy since the creative cloud was cracked within a week, and even then I do not think they care too much since most of the people who will pirate the application, will not use it for commercial purposes and likely could not afford it either thus making it very hard to argue that they would have purchased the application had they not been able to pirate it.
overall, In a professional (non educational) setting, when you use an adobe application in your industry, you will likely end up only using a small subset of the programs functionality, and upgrades are judged based on what they specifically do for the subset of the application that you actually use, thus an upgrade cycle can be anywhere from 5-10 years, and I believe that this is what adobe is trying to stop, (users buying a version of the application and not giving them more money through the purchase of upgrades because the upgrade did not their specific work flow.
So if they can offer a specific relevant upgrade and make it a cloud exclusive, they are hoping to get those customers to switch to the cloud and and thus make more money off of them compared to them only upgrading when there is an upgrade that is directly relevant to their workflow.
This switch will likely cause adobe to to become less innovative and less likely to to put any effort into upgrading all aspects of the application since they will no longer have to entice a wide range of industry professionals, and instead only upgrade minor things that are easy for them to upgrade for upgrades sake (kinda like how some shady firefox extension makers will have an ad filled page letting you know they just updated the extension, and if you extract the file and compare the before and after side by side, in many cases the only thing changed was the version number and the goal of the update was to just get you to view the update page)