Aftershot 3 Is Losing Me

I'm about done with Aftershot. Not only will a plugin (sold by them) not work, even after re-installing the entire program at the direction of their tech support, I cannot buy a gradient filter. I have tried two different credit cards and PayPal, and their payment system just doesn't work. I tried it several weeks ago, and again now. In the meantime, I have purchased plenty with all of those payment options.

I am not the kind of consumer who is willing to put in extra work to get you to take my money, especially when simple plugins don't work. The problem is, I also don't want to "subscribe" to Lightroom. What is another good option that actually works?

Unfortunately, this is not a new problem. I have personally spent tens of thousands of dollars on licenses for software in the past that promised much, but was functionally crippled or even inoperable. Authors of Photoshop and After Effects Plugins are particularly guilty of this problem and only the weight of bad reviews tends to drive them out of the market. Too bad you have to waste your money, time and good faith to prove to the World that a software package is unusable...

I once spent $30K USD on a software/hardware package for digital film restoration that drove me insane for 5 years as I had to beat product out of it's interface, all the while the support team insisted that the software was fine and that I needed to "tweak it a bit".

Have you tried Darktable (https://www.darktable.org/) or RawTherepe (https://rawtherapee.com/)? Both are free to download and Open Source, but both have their limitations. I think you may find you have to hammer out a workflow using multiple Open Source packages to arrive at a satisfactory outcome, but even if you go the Adobe route, you wind up having to supplement with plugins and other packages.

The problem arises when we seek simple solutions that promise easy answers. The answer is that nothing in digital manipulation is easy beyond the most basic tasks and you have to armor yourself with knowledge and experience to chart a meaningful path through all the soulless hype and marketing BS.

I'm no digital camera file processing expert, but Capture One has worked well for me.

Sorry to read this. I've been quite happy with Aftershot, and Corel in general, but I generally don't use most plugins.
On the payment processing question, any problems I have ever encountered with payment processors usually have something to do with a combination between the payment processor, the fact that I an my credit card are both Canadian, and my anti-virus/security software.
If you have pop-ups blocked, some payment processors do strange things.