John,
If there was a strong business case for Adobe to acquire the engine they could. It's bad business that they didn't do one of many things.
1. Include some contingency in the contract if said company went out of business they would have an opportunity to take over the core or code
2. When or if said company was going out of business someone from adobe could have reached out to said company. If you were going out of business you'd want to leverage any opportunity to generate revenue, even if you were closing your doors.
So in my mind this "issue" could have been avoided with better contracts or simply just common sense. Someone has that core code and it's not just disappeared. Adobe just decided not to pursue it.
If you sell cars and the company that you buy engines from is closing their doors AND you want to keep selling those cars you either buy that business, buy the IP, or reverse engineer the engines to work in your car.
Camtasia will do what I need at this time.