I'm not surprised that there's a lot of inertia.

VMware Workstation has historically been the most "it just works" option if one needed solid USB passthrough support. I've bought my own license for about 15 years because of that. Obviously I won't be doing that anymore because I refuse to subscribe instead of buying a permanent license.

I've been out of the infrastructure engineering space for a long time, but when that was still my career, vSphere was extremely reliable and easy to manage. When I've poked my head back in during pen tests since then, it's seemed like that was still the case.

Feels like Broadcom wants to use the Microsoft/Oracle/Cisco business model. They'll probably get away with it (at least for awhile) in the enterprise space, but they seem to have reached the same conclusion as me - Workstation and Fusion don't have enough exclusive aspects to be make the consumer market worth pursuing.