No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.
I think you aren’t thinking out this problem. While its not great that the IRS “targets” the poor. Its just simply they are the least likely to fight back against and will pay their debt in full. The rich, they fucking drag that shit out with lawyers, they have to try to hide it so you need well trained financial forensics to notice it and document it all and at the fucking end of it all, you are only getting a fraction of what you are literally owed. We want the government to be “efficient” yet we are complaining about the IRS doing their assigned task in an efficient manner because newsflash the lower income audits typically are far more automated, so they are simpler to do when your budget is limited.
Edit: Also I would like it to be remembered that the IRS are merely enforcers of the tax code. They aren’t exactly the ones who set it in place, they are just doing what they can with what they were given. Hell I’m fucking happy they allocated time and money for the free filling system. Its a step in the right direction because fuck the tax refund companies who lobby our government to make the taxes as painful/annoying as they currently are, when the tax man sort of already knows most of the information they are requesting like many other countries in the first world.