I’m in a lower cost of living European country, a lot of people use $200 phones here. $230 for “some photo editing software” made even my fiancée raise her eyebrows, and she’s used to seeing me pay a lot for computer stuff.

Yeah $229 is about $229 too much for something that comes bundled with a rootkit (nee Pace Interlok). Lightroom was about $140 ($80 for an upgrade) with no DRM, and pretty slick asset management.

Is that still true? I only found some very old forum posts, but nothing about the newer versions.

https://www.dxo.com/eula/

  For security reasons, DxO integrates DRM (“Digital Rights Management”)
  software components in the Software.

Don't know if it's still Pace Interlok, don't care.