The company I work at provides services for a lot of ad agencies in one of the smaller middle European countries and most of those still seem to use CS3, as well – so your observation seems to hold for Europe, too.
And I doubt if the ones that did switch early on gained any financially measurable advantage.
But I just consider it part of good corporate culture that a company provides employees with up-to-date tools of their trades.
(Apart from medical, 3D and some other features) image-editing-wise it is certainly true that one can achieve the same results with CS (or even older) as with CS4 – albeit with less comfort and editability.
So for graphic designers it may indeed not be very urgent to upgrade regularly.
As concerns »new happy features«: I for one have have not had a single case where I used the content aware scale for something other than showing how it works …
But the much publicized »bells and whistles« are not all there is to a new version – take Configurator.
That does not seem to have gotten very wide attention, but it offers a terrific workflow-improvement in my opinion.
As for the »pig factor«: I consider the reproachful complaints of the obstinately and willfully ignorant when they finally notice that their obsolete versions don’t run on new OSs or any number of other self-inflicted problems a bit annoying.
Anyway, you are not alone in lamenting (recent) developments at Adobe … I don’t seem to perceive the problem as strongly as others, though.
