You should see the FL users who always gives Image Line business advice fearing they would go under with their free lifetime updates that have existed for 20 years.
Same here. They gave out a nice deal when Cakewalk went under and I bought it. I've had a license ever since it was born and I paid for those upgrades. They raised their prices on upgrades and their upgrades from 8 till now seem quite frequent to other DAWs I have so I don't even keep it on my system. I didn't bother with the free version since I have Bandlab. I lose my fondness for DAW developers that seem to spend more time trying to sell you their plugins and less time between paid upgrades.
I also archive Steam libraries. Fallout 4 and Hitman 2 are over 100GB. It's easier to install from a drive instead of downloading again. I've bought external drives for this purpose.
I'm always a sucker for these. I recently discovered I have over 100gb of their stuff. The construction kits are stems and not loops. That is where the bloat is. I've started deleting those folders.
That's with just about everything. NI and Waves are worse. There is always some clueless developer that things everyone installs plugins in Steinberg\Vst.
No and you will find most of the packs are so so. In the future you might find the Suite a waste of money. As one who has Suite since Live 8, they added a Wavetable synth. Their sampler and many other things have not been updated. Those orchestral sounds are quite old. I think Sonivox did them a long time ago. All Live stuff is proprietary.
Then why buy it? Tracks and Amplitude are well worth it if you don't hav them. The ST libraries will take up a lot of space. This isn't a knock against ST but I'm in many forums where only once I've seen someone use ST in a project. I think part of it that it becomes overwhelming (like Komtplete) that people ignore it.
http://www.radiosure.com/
Not a VST but I like this one. It creates mp3s if you want.
I couldn't imagine someone actually paying for something like that.
Maybe in the Pro market but for hobbyists/home studios who don't make any money off their work it's not that large. They did dip down with a generous cross grade offer.
With all of the softsynths and available presets I find it hard to give up that kind of drive space. There are plenty of great Kontakt libraries that are small. I think we are in the age of using large GB for marketing is over.