There has been a lot of discussion on this, and to be honest it usually devolves into something of a headache. So I’ll give you my honest opinion and hope that it gives you some of my perspective. Whether it is worth it or not is entirely a personal thing.
If you are asking should you pay 50 for features you may or may not use, then the answer is no. If you can create your own files, then there really isn’t anything more than convenience tools for you.
I create my own files. But I also bought the premium. I bought it because I was able to get it at the intro rate rather than the 50 dollars. I make a lot of random things, but to me, the commercial rights on some of the cool things in the library was worth it on it’s own. I haven’t sold anything yet, but I can’t tell you how many pairs of kumiko earrings I have printed off for gifts this year. One of my good friends is an actress and she was wearing them in a photo shoot. It was nice to see.
I’m also paying for the convenience of it. The outline feature has been so useful. Yes, I can create an outline in Inkscape, but it requires so much clean up. A few weeks ago I tried to make a quick secret santa gift for my daughter’s friend. I cleaned up an image in my drawing software and put it into Inkscape to make an outline. It was a headache.
I decided to try to outline tool in the interface…it was like magic. There was no duplicating and deleting nodes and cleaning anything up. It seriously took the shape of the image that showed up and I adjusted the outline from there, and then I used to shape tool to make a circle to cut it out.
I’ve also conveniently used those same tools and the graphics library to create a bunch of quick products for other people, and the relief of not having to worry about commercial rights to those graphics was worth the price for me.
Would I pay 50 dollars for the same service? No. But I didn’t have to. Because I was able to use a coupon code. The price I pay is well worth the convenience to ME. But again, if you aren’t using ANY of it, like you create everything in your own design software and never use the features, then you can get away with never purchasing it. It won’t have a major impact on what you are already doing.
As far as faster processing speeds, I haven’t made anything that took much time to process anyways. I have noticed the button glowing before my computer has even processed how long the cut will take. That doesn’t help me much, because I never start a project until I’ve written down how long each cut takes.
The following links are random projects I used the premium features to create.