CorelDraw Support not fit for purpose!

I am a long standing client of Corel Corporation and have been using Coreldraw since 2010. Coreldraw is great and I enjoy using the software.

However, Corel have decided to follow Adobe's lead and new versions of the software are now available only through subscription. I can live with that, and in fact purchased a subscription when I upgraded from Coreldraw 2018 to version 2020.

My subscription was renewed earlier in April and I received a confirmation email to that effect. This entitles me to the latest version of the software, the March 2022 version. But I was busy with urgent marketing projects and had to put downloading, installing and going through the learning curve to get the hang of the new software on the back burner, continuing to work with version 2020 instead. Except that out of the blue, I loaded one of the projects I am working on, only to find that a whole bunch of menu options had been disabled. This, without any prior warning or explanation on how to re-enable the disabled options!!!

So I did the obvious thing; got hold of Corel Support. All the support agent could offer was the suggestion that I install the latest version, but this didn't take cognisance of the fact that I was on a tight deadline and couldn't spare the time to learn the new software, certainly not at the moment anyway. I enquired why I should not be able to continue using an older version of the software if that was my choice??? The agent couldn't provide a reason but generated a ticket to escalate the matter for the relevant department or a senior software engineer to respond.

I am still waiting for the response! But in the meantime I've received 2 to 3 emails enquiring whether the matter has been resolved (???) and informing me that in the absence of a reply the ticket would be marked as "RESOLVED."

This is typical of my experience with Adobe, which is why I ended my 5 user subscription to DC Cloud and why I've stuck with Coreldraw, choosing never even to consider Adobe's graphics art software products. But I'm afraid that Corel's going the same way, with Adobe as mentor to inform their (Corel's) strategy going forward.

If you're fed up with Adobe and were thinking of a move to Corel, think again!