Yes I have used Paritech for many years now. It costs about $415 pa for hourly downloads of ASX eod data. I'm really pleased with Amibroker! With Metastock I had to buy add-ons to do the sort of backtesting I wanted to do (Tradesim) and for procedural programming of indicators (Vitamin-C). Amibroker provides all of the functionality I need and is quite cheap. Although I'd also say that Amibroker is more aligned to the technically minded.
The Metastock change re forcing people to use DataLink, came shortly after I had cancelled a DataLink service I was using to download US data. It just stopped working after I moved to the NBN. I had no data download for longer than a week and wasn't getting much help from the DataLink people. I think the problem was a router upgrade in the US and the fact that the new Optus NBN IP may have been on the routers default filter list. Anyway that was enough for me. When I upgraded my PC and couldn't install my old version of Metastock because of their software security functions, my decision was made. I moved everything to Amibroker and haven't looked back.
