It is interesting that they initially offered subscription model without unexpirable license. But because of community backlash they changed it and people seem to be happy with the outcome.
I feel like you are understating the backlash they faced. I came back from a vacation the day after they announced it and checked here, /r/programming, and a few other developer-focused forums including their own site and it was like the world was on fire. There were very few people who supported the change or were even indifferent. It seemed like the entire community united against it. JetBrains really didn't have a choice but to listen. And thankfully they did; their products are invaluable to us at this point.
Forums in general have been dying out for a while now, unfortunately. I think this was back in August 2015 and at the time, I was an active member of some now-dead forums on the ProBoards network and I distinctly remember looking at either laravel.io or the Laracasts forums to gauge reaction.
I see. All I have left is this and the programming subreddit. The latter suffers a lot from new programmers and unrelated content (something like „I wrote my first HTML Tag today). Programming language specific subreddits suffer from a low number of subscribers. YC suffers from elite mindsets and arrogance (most notably on topics like modern javascript)
Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the version that existed when your sub starts not when it ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade the product to an old version.
Before if you bought a major point release you would get all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started.
Well, I think it's fair. If there was no subscription model, this would be the same as buying the version that was available at the time of your purchase. Everything that gets released after that is only a teaser that nags you to continue your subscription. You don't need to update.
Before the licensing change if you purchased a major version such as 5.0 you would get all upgrades for free until 6.0. This was the change that caused the uproar because that was no longer the case.
Listen to your users.