All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe's time has come. The Creative Cloud provider's suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades.
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
Most of these companies start the journey from a functional standpoint, avoiding extra layers that may "divert users' attention", such as refined flows, potential edge cases, and, sometimes, proper visual design foundations and user experience. Here, the goal is to ship the product first to validate its value, then address other considerations.