It’s all about what it’s worth to you. To some people, buying a Ferrari is worth every penny. To others, yeah, it’s a nice car, ridiculously priced. Just the yearly cost of fuel and insurance that goes with it can actually buy you a car that will suit your needs. It’s simple. If you really need and or / want it, then pay for it. If not, then do without.
Just because one finds the Ferrari too expensive doesn’t mean that Ferrari should drop the price to suit their budget, or that it’s ok to steal it because they want it but don’t want to pay for it. This is the argument that some people seem to be making to justify pirating stuff. Either give it to us cheap, or we’ll steal it.
Next to Windows, Photoshop used to be the most pirated program on the internet, because no one could afford to fork out $1000 to Adobe every couple of years for the latest version. Now they offer their monthly sub where you can get the latest, greatest version of Photoshop and Lightroom for $10US / month. And I would be willing to bet they make more money from that ongoing subscription than they previously did selling it as standalone.
I don’t think that a subscription would work well in the add-on market for the sim though. This is a model that works well when a single company is doing it for their own product(s) and are the complete gatekeepers of the entire ecosystem. Having all these 3rd party add-on makers, multiple separate online stores selling the add-ons, etc makes this far too complex for a subscription model to work.