RANT: Intuit's Turbotax bait and switch tax increase

I've been using Turbotax Deluxe for more than ten years out of habit and familiarity. If you're a typical middle class filer Deluxe would handle most situations you might encounter such as homeowner and investment tax issues. For business situations you needed Premier or higher. On Monday 1/26/2015 I received an apologetic email from Intuit, Subject: Our apologies. We want to make it up to you. In short Intuit has subtracted IRS schedules C, D, E and F from its Deluxe product in an effort to force a $40 price increase on large numbers of its longtime users. Thankfully, the response has been ferocious. Reviewers in large numbers on Amazon have blasted the change. In the email this was Intuit's explanation for this price increase that it doesn't call a price increase. "Here's why we made the change. Over the years, we have worked hard to make it easy for you to choose the TurboTax product that is right for you and your unique tax situation. We want that choice to be clear and confidence inspiring. However, as new online and mobile technologies emerged, our products, and the tax scope and features they included, began to differ, leading to customer confusion. These differences also impeded our ability to introduce new innovations across our entire product line.       So this year, we made the product experience consistent across all TurboTax offerings. This change enables us to innovate faster and make improvements that benefit all customers at the same time, regardless of whether they use our online or desktop software. You can be sure that we've preserved what's unique to our desktop product: the ability to e-file up to five returns, switch to forms mode and install the software on multiple computers."     Clearly Intuit thinks its users were born yesterday. I doubt I'm alone having used the same Turbotax version over the last 10 or 15 years because it fulfilled my needs. Did Intuit really think someone filing essentially the same tax return year in and out wouldn't notice the sudden absence of essential tax forms and schedules? This is not the same thing as the stealth price increases by grocery product manufacturers. Grocery shoppers have many choices and frequently buy products on sale at deep discounts.  Intuit benefits from a universally despised, obnoxious, annual and uncompensated government imposed individual mandate. It's bad enough millions of wage earners and business  owners must consume their time with this yearly exercise in misery but having a company pull this kind of bait and switch price increase is rubbing salt in the would. I for one will be taking a long hard look at alternatives to Turbotax such as H&R Block's software and TaxAct.