Yes, either US AI corps reduce the cost of their top tier personal subscriptions down to what people are already paying for other expensive personal apps (e.g. Adobe), so ~$50-100, or open weights are going to eat their lunch very quickly. We're not there yet, as current hardware doesn't allow you to do things like multiple parallel agents, but we'll get there soon enough.
I do not. I had 1 GPU and I had an expensive subscription. I simply cancelled it, and purchased a second figuring if I was going to spend the money anyway I'd rather have something to show for it at the end of the day. I'm not unique or special in my capability to do this. I figure I may as well purchase at least one GPU per year equivalent to what I would have spent on SOTA model subscriptions for that given year.
$500 for the old $200 is definitely a fumble.