It wasn’t one time fee though. The one time fee bought a copy of the software and its patches. A couple of years later a new version would come out and people had the choice between keeping using the old version or buying the new one.

To convince people to buy they had to add genuinely useful features. I would have bought a new version with new features and better performance. I wouldn’t have bought a new version same as the previous one with AI crammmed in it