Nick, you should take the time to do some reading here, at least the stickies where all this is explained clearly. And there are many threads where everybody is chiming in including Noel and Meng to clear up all the speculations that are just that.
First- You are not being forced to have anything to do with Bandlab or upgrade to the Cakewalk by Bandlab version. For now and hopefully a long time to come the Servers that authorize CCC and Splat will be keep alive. Carry on as always. You just won't get any updates or bug fixes but you can use Splat forever until it no long has an OS that it will run on.
Second- If you do some reading here you will quickly see that most of us long time users are happily using CbB without issue and are pretty darn stoked about how this has turned out. There's only a very few sort of paranoid types still being negative and un trusting of the new companies intent.
Third- CbB is far from shareware, it is Splat with the 3rd party paid for plugs removed. Just because something is free doesn't make it crapp. Obviously they know what they are doing with this and it's all to us long time Cake fans benifit.