This is what I've referred to in other contexts as the "Photoshop strategy". Literally everyone I knew growing up had pirated copies of Photoshop, but they wouldn't have used it without first pirating it, and they all grew up to take those Photoshop skills into respectable contexts where their employer was happy to pay Adobe exorbitant costs to stay legal, since Photoshop became such a fundamental part of their product development pipeline.