You seem to be comparing the price of TRS19 with the current price of TANE. When TANE was first released is was more expensive, as is often the case with new products. Some have stated that the original TANE price was very similar to the current TRS19 price - I did look back through my purchase records but have been unable to determine exactly what I paid for TANE but it was more than the current asking price.
I paid more for T:ANE too via Kickstarter, but on Kickstarter, it was available starting from 50 AUD (currently ~37US$). Early bird was even cheaper.
Even after release i'm quite sure that it was't more expensive than 50 USD.
I recently imported my TANE route into TRS19 (no errors or missing assets) and the visual difference is more than just some small changes here and there. The atmospherics alone (mist, sunlight filtering through trees, etc) gave the route a whole new look it didn't have in TANE.
I did the same with several routes I had in TANE and without changing more it doesnt look that great. I know and i'm definitely sure that its possible to have a far better visual experience in TRS 2019 (T:ANE had all settings to max, TRS 2019 on High settings).
But my point was that this are only visual improvements. At least for me, it's not all about graphics.
I recently had to buy a new laptop (it is amazing what a mug of hot tea will do to electronics) and the new machine has a far superior display system (GTX 1050ti graphics card and an IPS screen) to my existing desktop (GTX 750ti and stock standard LCD screen). But the laptop has only 8GB of RAM compared to the 24GB on the desktop. I initially installed TRS19 on the laptop only but later, for comparison, I also installed it on the desktop.
TRS19 runs just fine on the desktop. So far I have not noticed any major differences between the two systems - both have Turf FX, for example, which I did not expect to see on the desktop. I would expect that there will be some differences due to either the different graphic cards or RAM sizes.
The possible settings depend a lot of the route you use, my PC (Xeon e3-1241v3, 16GB DDR, GTX 970) doesnt run that smoothly on High settings on some routes.
My informal survey of these forums seems to indicate, from those who have posted what they have purchased, that it is running about 50-50 between subscriptions and outright purchases. So I don't see where you get the assessment that "nearly all people (and they're a lot) won't use it". Some people clearly do see an advantage in the subscription model, others don't. Each person will make that decision based on their own requirements and experiences. In my case I don't have much DLC and tend to spend most of my time creating routes and sessions, so the purchase option was the obvious choice. Others have stated that they spend most of their time in Driver and little (or none) in Surveyor so one of the subscription options was their preferred choice.
Damn, i forgot the part "most people I talked to" in that sentence, excuse me. Of course I do not want to speek for the whole community.I guess, we germans are a bit more cautious, we prefer to own things (my experience), of course that may be different and may change over the time.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not against TRS 2019, but i'd be luckier to see new game features, too instead of mostly visual changes. There are parts in Trainz, that really need improvement, even smaller functions e.g. its still not possible to have a second driver position (in a loco with two cabs) without using own scripts, also it's not possible to have double slip switches with procedural track.
Maybe i'm just a little disappointed because nearly all is about graphics, but tastes are different.
People that buy TRS 2019 (once) have the disadvantage, that they can't use e.g. the Trainz-Plus features or they have to pay TRS 2019 twice. So they seem to be excluded from the new features until a new product is released. And for that 69$, that should have been included, in the past, features for the buy-once version have also been added e.g. via Service Packs.
