First of all I must say that Sublime Text is the best text editor in the world and all the changes coming with Sublime Text 3 will make it even better.
About the pricing:
I’m just a student and Sublime is just a text editor, with many alternatives out there for free. And while you don’t have much money as a student, you get many things that you might need for studying for free (Microsoft products) or least a discount, except Sublime Text. If I would be already working and Sublime Text would help me to earn money, the old 59$ and the new 70$ would be fair price. But I don’t and therefor buying Sublime Text 2 last autumn was a big investment for me. Since then Sublime Text 2 hasn’t seen any updates and now I can switch to Sublime Text 3 Beta, but it will take some time for the plugin developers to update and when they are done it will not last long until Sublime Text 3 is released and I would have to pay another 30$ or go back to Sublime Text 2.
About the changes:
I think the step to Python 3 is right, some might argue that it is too early, but Python 3 is the future and someone has to go forward first (before the other follow).
The promised speed improvement would be very cool, but so far I can only test ST3 without plugins and without plugins ST2 starts instantly as well for me. So I have to wait for some plugins ports so see if ST3 slows with them as ST2 does. Also speed was always a trademark of Sublime Text, so any speed improvement I see more as a bug fix than as a new feature. Therefor I would have expected those improvements as small updates to Sublime Text 2 over the last months. While there were no updates I paid the 59$ for the program without getting any bug fixes (and the lack of speed was not the only bug).
The improvements to the Goto feature are very nice, but do not satisfy a major update for 30$.
Conclusion:
I’m happy to see the movement forward and I appreciate Jon’s work, but I’m very disappointed from the update policy. First no updates for Sublime Text 2 and now the expensive update. 5-10$ would be ok for me (as student) if Jon adds some more little features.
Further I think a cheap update would guaranty that most of the users switch as soon as the plugins are working. Then the plugins developers can focus on the new version and the user base would not split (which would be very bad).