To me, it's bizarre they don't just utilise the Altium Designer core and cripple certain aspects depending on the level purchased and whether subs are ongoing.
This may still stem from the old "turning the world of electronics design upside down" marketing campaign (and even before that) when they bet the company that FPGA was the future, and they actually made the PCB tool
optional extra 
They knew that people just wanted the basic PCB tool and didn't want the FPGA, modular design or programming stuff , but because they had sold the investors on this vision (and believed in it) they couldn't go with a "buy just what you need licensing model" because then that would could expose the FPGA/modular design dream as something nobody wanted, as sales for those modules would be near zero. So they had to stick to the "all you can eat" pricing model to force uses to pay for the whole thing to get basic PCB functionality.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090311063044/http://fpgajournal.com/articles_2007/20070619_altium.htmNow that all that hoopla is long gone, it might still be relevant, because if you have to pay for various extra tools, then you quickly find out where your bread and butter income comes from. That's useful, but sometimes you are better off not knowing when it comes to a company growth perspective. e.g. if you find out 90%+ of your customers only need a basic $2000 core tool, then it might be hard to sell all the money spent on developing new bells and whistles to the investors.
It's a tough call, but I don't blame them for sticking with the "all you can eat" pricing model.
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