Matt,
One of the greatest benefits I see is that you can message the guy who wrote the software, who knows it inside/out and supports it so well.
Try doing that with Adobe.
I have been battling Waves with a few problems with some of their plugins and you get passed from person to person to someonoe else who isn’t responsible for THAT plugin, and so it goes on. After 7 months I got the issue resolved .. it was just getting someone in the know to get to someone who can push you cause inside their committee of varied programmers inside or outside the organisation. Never again.
I am really getting into liking, very much, the guy who writes it runs and answers the forum.
Scott