No, it's still misleading. People like me, who already had a working version at the time the subscription was rolled out, simply chose to do nothing or switch to a competing service. People who didn't want subscriptions saw the writing on the wall and started migrating to other products.

To suggest that their userbase wanted to voluntarily give up their paid-for software that was working just fine and swap it out for a subscription service just to get feature parity is silly. As you said, they made it clear that subscription was the way of the future and that anyone who didn't want a subscription product should look elsewhere, so we did. Let's not act surprised when their only remaining customers were those who wanted a subscription version.

> It's in the release notes, it was on the site, and it was in the forums. I think they may have even emailed it to people at one point (I've been a user since v3)

I don't see where anyone was claiming it was done in secret. It has been discussed at every step of the way on social sites like HN for years.

The secret part is that they've gone to great lengths to bury the standalone version 7 link on their website, and now they're claiming that not many people buy it. Of course they don't, because it's virtually impossible to find or even know that it exists unless someone passes you the link.