Victoria,
I can see where you're coming from. I spent a couple of hours on Scott Kelby's site this afternoon reading all those posts slagging him (with some justice) for being an Adobe shill. It's a tough time to say anything publicly that appears to be pro-Adobe. It's good that you can maintain your neutrality.
I've bought the last six or so versions of Photoshop, even though I hardly use it at all. I like shiny, new software, and I was able to convince myself that upgrading made sense, and eventually I'd get around to doing something that justified the expense. Having to run PS as a subscription just doesn't feel the same, even if it would cost the same, which it won't. So I won't be going to the Cloud version, and I'll finally save the money that I should have been saving all along.
If I had a real need for the latest and greatest, I'd subscribe, but with what I need in terms of non-LR post-processing, it would feel like I was just flushing that money down the drain. I'm sure that CS6 will do me well until it will no longer run on whatever computer I'm using, at which point I'll see what's available to replace it with.
In the meantime, I'll need to convince myself that if I lose the ability to run Photoshop, I'll be able to use the TIFFs or PSDs that I produced with it. Will GIMP read TIFFs with layers? I don't know, but I'll find out. Maybe by that time, PSE will handle 16-bit (or more) images, and I could use that, but I can't know that from here.
The real fly in the ointment would be if Adobe decided to no longer sell some future Lightroom with a perpetual license. They probably can't hold my images ransom, but they definitely could do that with my catalogue. We'd all be put in one heck of a bind, with no real recourse but to subscribe. I don't trust them not to do it, and I don't know what I need to do to make it so I can feel OK about the possibility that they will. Trusting them to do the right thing by their users is no longer a viable strategy.
I'm not panicking, and I'm not about to make any quick changes to how I use LR or do my post-processing. I'll buy LR 5 when it comes out, and if future versions are still sold as programs, I'll buy those as well, but I'll also be looking at other DAM solutions, just in case.
Hal