Whose salaries, exactly? In most of the country, that's a couple months rent for an entire middle class family. I earn well, and I cannot imagine ever paying that much for any piece of software unless I needed it for a profit-making venture and the ROI was very obvious and very positive.
Fusion was initially (and still is to some extent) targeted explicitly at hobbyists. At one point the CEO made lots of noise about his commitment to the maker community. 'Course since then Autodesk went from a company run by a maker to a company run by a marketing dweeb and a beancounter.
Sorry, but Autodesk was always run by beancounters. They wanted their share in office products, and went lucky with CAD. Read John Walkers "Autodesk Files".
In the context of Fusion, it was the pet project of Carl Bass who is very much a maker. He constantly championed free access for hobbyists to Fusion 360. I suspect a big part of his departure was due to not having any path towards monetizing the huge cash sink that was Fusion. Bass' replacement was the chief marketing officer.
