No I pretty much still just need Photoshop features from 2000, 25 years later. That’s $24 a year instead of the current price of almost $24 a month.

Your perpetual license on a fixed version of Photoshop would not have been transferrable across OS/compute generations for 25 years.

In practice most longtime Photoshop users paid the $600 once and some $200~ upgrade cost every 2-4 years. Adjusted for inflation its same or more than what you pay now.

If you think you'd be fine now with 25 year old Photoshop features you maybe forget how basic the product was compared to today. Further besides OS compatibility there were file format / camera raw version additions made over time that you'd have wanted.

You can get 2000-level Photoshop for free from many sources now, so you shouldn't be complaining about cost increases. Paid software has moved upmarket and bundled. The work done by people who need paid software has become more complex and vertically integrated (productivity increase.)

Are you also happy running Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) which seem to be the last versions officially supported? (I guess on Windows it may have worked in some form or another longer than that but surely it doesn't work anymore on Windows 11 which is the only version currently supported.)

If that's all you need, there are free alternatives that should be more than sufficient today.

aren't there open source programs that have caught up to early 2000s era photoshop?