Agreed. In principal, I don’t have issues with paying a fair monthly price for a service. But if I’m paying for access to something, I had better have premium tier service, uptime guarantees on all dependent services, top tier customer support, and see bugs and regressions fixed in a prompt manner.
Right now, I don’t think Microsoft are able to deliver on any of those points.
In any case, we have what we have. I don’t think they’d be able to legally (in most countries) switch a previously “purchased up front” service to a paid monthly one unless they added something signifciant over the base. So this is not likely to happen.