I understand the frustration. Maybe I can clarify the situation a little. Stager is not a "reskinned" version of Dimension. It is a completely different engine under the hood which is one reason Adobe later dropped development of Dimension in favor of Stager. There is a broader context, however. [Disclaimer: Some of what follows is opinion, some is educated guesswork, some is based on what Adobe team members and managers were able to share, but I don't work for Adobe and never have.]
When Adobe promised a 3D tool for designers (MAX 2016), the idea was to give "flatlanders" like you and me an easy-to-use tool to put our designs onto 3D models. I am sure that promise was sincere, and at the time Adobe's customers were almost all flatlanders.
Fulfilling it proved a lot harder than it looked, however. Dimension got off to a rocky start. The early releases, as expected of v1.0, were fragile and buggy. Designers weren't prepared for the learning curve of 3D; they didn't see enough potential value to outweigh the pain of getting there. Adobe failed to educate them and failed to entice them: a whopping failure of marketing. As a result, uptake among designers was sparse and grew very slowly. (It's a separate story, but worth mentioning, that the uptake of 3D by Photoshop users doesn't seem to have been great, either.)
In 2019, Adobe acquired Allegorithmic, which practically owned the market for CGI texture creation with a product line called "Substance." Adobe suddenly had a lot more 3D development resources and a huge new user base of a type they hadn't dealt with much before: 3D artists. It's hard to overstate the difference between designers and 3D artists. They live in quite different universes, and the Venn diagram has little overlap.
Merging 3D teams and technologies let directly to the Adobe Substance 3D collection. Predictably, a lot of people were unhappy. Legacy Substance customers didn't like the new subscription model and, like loyal fans anywhere, didn't like a Big Bad Corporation acquiring their favorite software. Designers who were Dimension users were peeved by its abandonment and weren't overjoyed by the prospect of having to pay an additional $50/month subscription to use only one or two Substance 3D products. I was one of those designers, as you will know if you read the Open Letter to Adobe Theresa Jackson and I wrote following the Substance 3D announcement.
In all fairness, however, we can't forget economics. Adobe's management is legally obligated to not do stuff that loses money. I don't know what the costs are to set up and manage a worldwide subscription service in multiple languages and currencies, with all the legal and accounting stuff that goes with that, but they aren't small. The costs won't vary much with the number of subscribers, so you would need big numbers, such as with the Photoshop/Lightroom subscription, to break even.
You see where this is going. There almost certainly weren't (and probably aren't, even now) enough Dimension users to make a separate subscription cost-effective. A cross-subscription offering (Stager being part of both Substance and Creative Cloud) may similarly be too expensive to implement for a tiny number of users. From a designer perspective, though, a combined Illustrator and Stager subscription would make a great deal of sense.
I would love it if Adobe were to make Stager available to CC subscribers at a low cost. It seems unlikely to happen unless there is a much bigger user demand, as there was for the Photoshop subscription.
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