Well despite the complaints or happiness (whatever you’re feeling), one thing remains true: Steinberg wants everybody who’s been using an old version, to upgrade! And they want it bad enough that they made it a high incentive. Perhaps they started a new platform and don’t want to continue supporting the old one? Perhaps the new software has so many new bells and whistles that they wish to pacify their loyal base (after all, there’s a lot of new features that do similar work as Fabfilter, iZotope, and other high-end software products). Who knows? Whatever the reason, they are wanting everyone to jump on-board, and this decision makes it hard to say, “No!”
I bought Cubase 10.5 3 months later they upgraded to Cubase 11 now I also need to fork out more money for the upgrade. This is the Steinberg formula, I have been with Steinberg since their first edition Cubasis, I will be looking for an alternative DAW in future even if it costs more money it’s the principal. No wonder there are so many people with cracks and elicit programmes you create this Steinberg
Bienvenue chez steinberg 
I sense that the model will probably change in the next year or so, likely will support a superscription model.
No. No subscription.
I think it will be much better than the current subscription model, which it really is.
You could still fall back to your owned version if you choose to stop paying the subscription, which would probably be less than the current upgrade price. Combine that with dongless and they are going to probably gain a lot of subscriptions, and potentially cut out extra bloat at the same time. No real point to do it until they go dongless, IMO.
If they can do it for reanable price I will support it, eg. 10.00 /mo.
I also recently finished a sub with Adobe, it is very nice to have the full pro suite available just for a short time, as I don’t need all that often. Win-win.