They are a large corporation. Who will lead the attack? Nobody. Who is even in a position to? Every industry has a company that operates like this, creating its own little loopholes and hurting their own consumers, but because they are taking advantage of customers, they can thrive in ways that more legitimate and benevolent companies cannot, eventually taking strong dominance.
Either way, they go against the spirit of consumer protection and operate under extremely poor ethic. With the inception of CC, that got markedly worse as many customers (especially specialist freelance professionals and small businesses using the intermediate suites) are now having to pay significantly more for significantly less product, which Adobe is putting less effort to improve and less effort to ensure they work properly in the first place.
Regardless of whether you can see it or not, that is what is happening.
Fortunately, a massive chunk of Adobe's customers have seen this coming and have left, preferring to dump cash into their competitors' pockets. That might be adequate for some in some industries, but for other avenues, Adobe's dominance is too strong to break. In our company, I have to use Adobe because everyone else uses Adobe. So I use Premiere Pro instead of whatever else because someone else is going to use InDesign and while there are strong video editing packages now to compete with Premiere/AE, there is nothing yet available for ID (this is not as simple as I am saying it, but for brevity's sake).
I just lost an SSD type HDD on my office computer so I'm rebuilding a bunch of stuff from scratch these past two weeks. I find it remarkable to see the dramatic difference between how MS handles long-term hotfixes and how Adobe handles them. MS has so many hotfixes available for Office 2007 that they often obscure the path to the hotfixes for Office 2010. Yeah, in the year 2017.
MS is no shining star here of course, but compared to the attitudes displayed by Adobe, they are light years ahead. And like I said before, these two companies work under the same basic set of rules. I find it very hard to believe that MS supports their products for 7 years+ just because they want to be nice. But I find it quite believable that they do it because they feel they are obligated to (probably legally obligated to), but they haven't put their effort into trying to shirk their responsibilities as software developers and find loopholes that allow them to screw over their customers like Adobe has. Adobe might have the letter of the law on their side because they found some tricks, but the consumer is clearly getting screwed here on many levels.
As I said before, simply stating that software might not work as described does not absolve them of legal responsibility to ensure it works as described, it probably is just enough to make it too difficult for any interested parties to actually enforce their legal responsibilities as a software creator.
I work in manufacturing and we cannot simply say "this product will function as this type of product, but we make no guarantee that it will function as described" because if our product fails in this way, someone will fall off the side of a mountain or have a massive accident on the roads at high speed, being slowed down by the friction of their face against tarmac. Pretty likely that we would face some lawsuits pretty quick. However, if the worst thing that could happen was quite minor, but still impaired the function of the product in some way, perhaps something like created a bad ankle position which encouraged tendonitis in some individuals, it's pretty likely that nobody would ever take us to court for that. As a manufacturer, it is our choice then if we will modify our design to prevent that bad ankle position or if we just say "nyeh" and play the odds at the customer's expense.
You obviously care enough to speak out in defense of Adobe, but the matter is moot until either there is widespread, low level resistance (unlikely) or someone gets a bee in their bonnet enough to actually take them to court (also unlikely).
I do appreciate that you're putting time and effort into making it work and I do appreciate the information out there regarding scripting. But maybe realize that CC is a strongly destructive force in this industry. For whatever reason, that doesn't impact you personally, but it does indeed impact many, many people. The correct path chosen by many since CC was introduced is to simply refuse to pay. Adobe's prices went up significantly for the people most strongly affected, so they are insulated from that. For the intermediate suite user doing an every 1.5-2 year upgrade path (very common), the cost of CC is almost 3 times as much. They can therefore afford to comfortably lose 60% of those customers without impacting their bottom line. Press releases at that time showed that they expected a mass exodus at that time, but were rolling the dice on their dominance. It paid off for them financially and they lost less than they expected, but still probably very large numbers (greater than 50% in many segments) who were paying customers are no longer paying customers. Further, you have already acknowledged that support is bad and getting worse, but also those of us who were paying attention for the past 15 years have seen a significant decline in *useful* improvements. Without a strongly iteration-based development cycle, there is less emphasis on large product improvements and most of their improvements, even on "major" cycle releases (ie the recent one a couple of months back) are very weak and offer few genuine benefits to their users.
Don't be under the illusion that CC has done anyone any favors. I can't make them behave well, nor can you. But both of us who put time and effort into helping people with their Adobe software have a responsibility to be truthful and clear about the harm CC continues to do to the industry where we get they money to eat and feed our families. Is it criminal? Probably on some level. Are there loopholes so they can say "not specifically illegal"? I would assume so. Will anyone enforce it or try to clarify or protect the consumers? Doubtful.
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