Your reply is pretty far off base, IMO.

Creative Suite has evolved leaps and bounds since 1991. It has even evolved leaps and bounds in the last 10 years alone. It's strange to me that someone who really uses Adobe's products would say such a thing. Creative Suite is the only one in the game because it's SO good that there isn't a chance for a competitor to step in. They are also constantly adding new tools to the suite at no additional cost.

As for DAWs, I happen to produce music and have used most of the major DAWs over the last 15 years, though I've settled on Ableton Live. I have zero problems with VSTs crashing, and I often run projects with 50+ VSTs running simultaneously. Stolen VSTs can have stability issues, of course. Hardware dongles are also fairly rare. Only a handful of companies use them, and they aren't really a problem at all as long as you aren't in the habit of stealing software. They typically install in the USB port, not the parallel port. Parallel port dongles were used by Steinberg and were phased out long ago.

I'm curious - what DAWs in particular have you used, and which VSTs are you having problems with?

> For graphics, everyone still use Adobe products which are not that bad but still few had changed in Photoshop and Illustrator from 1991.

As a designer I can tell you Serif is doing great things already. Affinity Designer is a solid Illustrator replacement, most of my printed work for clients comes out of that. People are excited about Affinity Photo and Publisher, which are Photoshop and InDesign replacements.

Not to mention UI/UX which is pretty much dominated by Sketch, with very few people using the Adobe equivalent (Xperience Design or whatever it's called).

The biggest issue is compatibility though: the vast majority of teams exchange files in .psd, .ai, .indd which are proprietary formats, so there's lots of reluctance to change and difficulties collaborating if someone uses a different thing. It's a bit like Microsoft Office versus all the other formats, open or not.

My illustrator friend uses manga studios, he loves it:

http://my.smithmicro.com/manga-studio-comic-illustration-sof...

> People are buying hardware synths (which are just computers running software) only because software on these embedded computers runs reliably, but VSTs crash, freeze every time and require hardware license keys plugged into parallel port.

I only know about guitar pedals, but aren't a good portion of these analog through and through?

A friend and I are actively working on innovating in the context of DAWs and music production, we're specifically trying to modernize the discovery and accessibility of plugins. Nice to see DAWs mentioned here - there's a lot that could be improved in the field and we're hoping to tackle several outstanding issues in the near future.

(If anyone's interested, hit the second link in my profile.)

There's a lot of cool things happening in the creative tools space. Along with the tools mentioned above, Figma is a good take on how design teams can work together (plus, it's web-based, which is just cool).