I'm not sure how many occasional LR users there were/are. Either it's software someone needs to manage their non-phone photo library plus editing or not. Those type of people are also likely to upgrade every year. So if you compare pricing you need to compare to also upgrading every year. In that case the subscription was pretty close in price.

As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.