Dan,
First off...still love your work and still mourning your absence from the plugin market.
With that said, I am NOT against paying for upgrades.
Here is what I am NOT willing to pay for:
1) Bug fixes...sorry, but that also includes stability improvements.
2) New licenses to match C4D upgrades (eg. same program, no major code changes, just generating a new license to work with a new version of C4D)
3) Renting the same (and not improved) program year after year.
Here is what I am willing to pay for via an upgrade pricing model:
New major architecture changes to continue working with significant changes to C4D's core architecture -- in essence I do believe setting up the program to work with future C4D releases is a worthy investment on my part as with it comes the potential for the next three items:
New features
Speed improvements
Scale improvements (ability to handle much large object sets, better viewport performance, etc).
And here is what I am absolutely dead-set against and where I think GSG crossed the line:
Having to buy into leasing a much larger set of products in order to keep my plugin current. Why do I have to buy materials and training if I just want my plugin to work with future versions of C4D? Seriously....what were they thinking?
Sorry, if I want textures I can go to Pixel Lab (who offers just as much variety in textures and models for various render engines plus ODB based products as well -- and at a much fairer price --- especially when you catch them on Black Friday). For training, I can go to Core4D, Rocket Lasso, Eye Design, Wolf 3D and a thousand other YouTube channels.
Dave