A number of people have said they are happy with a subscription model. Here's why, for some people, a subscription model is a killer.
It's a sad fact of life that many small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) go through the occasional cash-flow crisis. I've worked for, or with, a lot of SMEs and I've seen a lot of those cash flow crises even in well managed companies. What determines whether a business survives a cash-flow crisis is whether they have effective ways of minimizing their cash outgoings while still being able to manage business as usual.
If you own assets you need for your business you can sweat them. Delay upgrades to software and hardware, put up with the crappy old delivery van that needs careful coaxing to start in winter, don't buy the custom reception carpet with the logo in it*, persuade the staff to put off bonuses and rises until the crisis is over and so on.
If you rent any thing that is essential to your business you can't put off paying for it, it isn't an asset, it's a liability, it can't be sweated. If you can't pay for it you stop being able to do your work, if you pay for it in preference to other essentials you can't do what they are required for.
With that in mind, I would say that it is a fool who rents something essential to his business that isn't fungible (that is easily replaced with something similar, mutually exchangeable). Premises are fungible, cloud hosting is arguably fungible but something like software that requires retraining and/or retooling isn't fungible.
The current market for Eagle is SMEs and hobbyists. Wise SMEs know they will likely face cash flow problems at some point. Given the choice between the 'sweatable' asset of a perpetual software licence and the ongoing liability of a rental model the wise SME is going to take the former choice every time. Wise SMEs eventually grow, foolish ones go out of business.
Ergo, Autocad has just sown the seeds of Eagle becoming a hobbyist only product while simultaneously changing their available licences to make it a less attractive product to a section of the hobbyist market (who I suspect they don't really want and don't really care about).
* I once had a company that made custom carpets as one of my customers. They stopped supplying SMEs directly because it seemed that the arrival of a custom carpet with the company logo in the reception area of an SME was a clear marker that the company was on the verge of going out of business and therefore would, most likely, not actually pay the bill for said carpet. Other signs to look out for are frequent reorganizations of offices or product lines, aka "Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic".