sad and angry about Adobe breaking my copy of Acrobat Pro 8

It looks like I am at the end of the road on getting Acrobat 8 running again on my Windows 10 PC.  Long story, but it’s very discouraging to spend hours trying to get the software I’ve used happily for years to work again.  I used to love Adobe (I was at the product announcements for both ATM and Acrobat in the early ’90s) but not so much these days.  So I guess I just need to get this off my chest.

I’ve read many posts in here about the problem, about activation servers retiring, posts by Nancy O’Shea saying very firmly that it is dead and obsolete software.  I can understand any company not wanting to support old software 10 years on, but if it works, why prevent people who bought it in the past from using it—it’s not costing them anything.  It just seems mean and greedy to prevent people from using software they have bought.  My original purchase worked for years on Windows 7, 8, and 10 (the last 3 years), but when my Windows 10 PC died and I got a new one, the activation mess started.

I relied on the features of 8 Pro that let me remove security (why my banks/brokerages lock my PDF statements, I don’t know), compress to shrink the file, scan with OCR to make it searchable, and add comments and highlighting—but I will not pay $150/year subscription fees for that.

Any suggestions for a good cheap or free clone that offers those features?

P.S.   Another change that bothered me 10 years ago was when they broke an incredibly powerful feature that let me link with a web page HTML link directly to an internal anchor in the middle of a PDF file.  It stopped a pet project of mine in mid-track.