@jules made it pretty clear how much (or little) that 5 minutes of efficiency gain is worth to her 
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Luckily my husband gets AI it through work and he is allowed personal copies at home. University licenses are cool that way. Previous to this, I was learning inkscape and wouldn’t have switched except that it isn’t mac friendly. (can be made to work, with fiddling at updates.)
I won’t pay for subscriptions to software. I see and recognize the business model, and I reject it. If I were running a business, and I cared about my cut more than my customer, I’d be lobbying and backroom dealing all over to make that the deal. Lease your car, lease your house, lease your computer, your phone, lease your pants. Constant revenue stream… absolutely.
As a consumer, though, I defy that model all I can. While using AI, since the company gives it to me… I am a bit of a sell-out, then.
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Still using a15 year old version of Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat. Loaded and runs fine on Windows 10. Obviously feature challenged.
Before CC I was updating the Adobe Suites roughly ever other version at a cost of around $750 each time, so roughly $375/ year or we’ll just round it down to $1.00 a day for arguments sake
I have found that the cost of Creative Cloud is worth it for me. I use PS, LR, AI, DW, ID and Acrobat DC several times a month for most of them, a lot more for PS, LR, and AI. I like that things like Typekit (now Adobe Fonts) has become unlimited for CC users recently too, making it an even better deal. For CC I’d round the cost to about $1.75 a day on the subscription. That is way less that a lot of people I know spend on coffee or Cokes.
There is something to be said about familiarity and $1.75/day for professional software isn’t a bad deal, especially since it is always up-to-date.
I’m not trying to talk you into our out of your software choice, just framing it a bit differently for you.
You might want to check out Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo as sombody mentioned above. They are both quite usable and a one-time charge of $39.99 each (that is 20% off the normal $49.99 price for their holiday sale). There are several people using those packages exclusively for their GF work and you don’t have to have a lot of technical background to install and use them.
Good luck no matter what you choose.
What are those things? 
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Coasters.
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You win. I lost all of those in Katrina (they didn’t swim well at all 
). That is about the version I started using way back when.
I do have all my Creative Suite disks going back to CS 1 through CS 5.5
And of course this comic always pops into my head when talking Photoshop…
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Okay, just looked it up. It was the first version for Windows, released 26 years ago. I’m a longtime user, but bailed after the subscription model!
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I have some of those coasters - but they say Windows 3.1 on them
For some reason I cannot bring myself to trash them! Sigh
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“It’s a 3D print of a save icon!”
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I use CS3 even though it has some funky quirks that CS4 doesn’t have (son has CS4 and I have CS3…and so we have a side by side comparison)…
…that saying…tonight I powered up CS3 and Illustrator ate my left hand tool bar…been googling and thus far none of the tricks have worked. argghhhh first time I have had this happen. (cut it out of the folder it was in, moved to another location…opened it in new location and no toolbar…closed, moved back, and still no toolbar. sigh. Only a part time user here…so not worth paying for the CC monthly…
I don’t have AI near me, but have you tried looking in “View” or “Window” and selecting the Tools Panel? Also, somewhere in those two, you can select predefined workspace layouts that will probably bring it back. See if that works.
As a last resort you can try resetting all the preferences.
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/setting-preferences.html
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