They get all of Maxon One for that hundred bucks, including all the Red Giant stuff, Redshift, ZBrush and whatever else gets chucked in there.
And I actually do see the logic of it as a business decision. Clearly less people will be signing up to this higher price than before. The people that do sign up will be paying higher than before. Those people will probably also be more keen on sticking with C4D and using it as a career, versus the percentage (I won't say 'handful' as it could be many) of people who wanted to test the waters, were half interested, but view the hundred bucks as an obstacle. So they go away, Maxon has less work to deal with managing it, and they probably still kinda / sorta make the same dollars.
I could be wrong. Dave can pop in here with a big spreadsheet showing earnings and interest and projections if anyone really wants to get into the dollar logic of why they put the price up. When I sub again it won't be at the educational rate so in a number of ways I don't really care about this.
There are a few references to Blender in that Reddit thread but I would frankly view it as newsworthy if a C4D comments thread pops up anywhere online without at least three guys telling us how wonderful Blender is. Blender is pretty cool, and I have this on a lot of authority because the past five years of scrolling C4D threads everywhere have usually carried a handful of folks giving one sentence comments or five words or even just two words mentioning Blender, like
"There's always Blender...."
"You could always use Blender..."
"Or, there's Blender..."
"Blender is free!"
and so on. This was all useful info the first time I heard it but is maybe less effective reading it the 5000th time, but this is just me. And I do think Blender is cool. But it's very janky and even the non-janky bits sit tightly alongside the bits that are janky, all of it managed and sorted out by a particularly janky Object manager.
The Reddit thread does have a quite fair comment from a teacher who noted, in NZ a lot of the kids at the school where he teaches are poor and $100 is a week's groceries. This is fair enough and if he's going to learn and then teach them all Blender, I guess they'll all be learning Blender. If this is a good thing for everyone I'm not sure what the problem is.
People say we live in a world of dramatic exciting change with AI and new free software apps and entire industries changing, and who knows where we will be in five years etc etc? In reality I know exactly where we will be in five years, threads will still be bubbling along at a low rate with some folks expressing satisfaction and some dissatisfaction at whatever Maxon has just done, every online comments thread here and on Youtube and elsewhere will have another five to ten guys writing "There's always Blender..", "You could just use Blender", "Maybe it's time for Blender?", and this will be the state of affairs for the rest of our lives, with neither Maxon nor the excitable Blender fans ever changing.