The Adobe Monopoly

I agree with most of what you say. But not the idea that these things don't work well together. If you know the software the workflow is just as seamless.

One of the biggest reasons companies like Adobe and Autodesk have a seeming monopoly on their respective industries is mostly to do with the fact their software suites fit seamlessly into high end production pipelines nicely, and all their software works very well together (as intended). As you mentioned, you can get reasonably close or even exactly the same results with more inexpensive software, but in some cases you'd need several applications to do the same job of one Adobe product, and this forces you to "round-trip" in and out of the packages quite a bit to get the job done. Not all the software packages you mentioned play nicely together out of the box, and doing round-trips between several packages is just not as efficient as having all the tools you need to do a particular task in one place. In studios, where cost has more to do with time and efficiency than upfront cashflow, this is one big advantage of using Adobe products vs. 5 or 6 other brands that aren't meant to interact with each other out of the box. I'm sure there's other reasons that have more to do with marketshare and dirty business "behind the scenes", but this kind of pipeline centralization and corporate support plays a role in which software to choose for larger production houses.