I'm glad you found a solution to your problem -- but if you could indulge me, I wanted to circle back and comment on this specifically.
As a matter of historical record, the original IntelMac was actually released without support for Windows at first, in January '06. Apple publicly acknowledged that it was "theoretically possible" to run Windows on those Macs, but made no announcements of official support. Naturally, the "homebrew" community didn't exactly wait on Apple; by the following month, enthusiastic Mac users had already figured out how to shoehorn Windows onto their shiny new IntelMacs. They had essentially forced the matter well before Apple released any software support for the capability, and Apple -- to their credit -- chose not to fight against it, and instead followed up with official support in the form of an initial Bootcamp beta in April, which became more broadly available in '07.
So no: the primary reason that Apple had switched to Intel wasn't to run Windows. They actually made the swap because PowerPC processors could no longer deliver the performance-per-watt marks that Apple needed to hit in order to remain competitive, specifically in the laptop market. If you were around during that time, you may recall the frustration that Mac fans experienced as we waited for a G5 PowerBook that simply never arrived... because the G5 sucked power like a hurricane sucks up ocean water. Sure, the G5 was fast, but drawing more wattage naturally translates into generating more waste heat. Thus, the G5 ran really, really hot... and IBM dropped the ball; they just couldn't find a way to get that heat under control without tanking performance.
In came Intel, with promises of a diverse CPU lineup that could meet Apple's needs in both the desktop and laptop market. The fact that swapping to Intel also meant that Macs could run Windows was more of a happy coincidence than a design choice -- at least, from the point of view of their customers. Internally, Apple clearly never cared at all about being able to run Windows, as can be attested by their more recent decision to swap out Intel for their own Silicon. As with the previous transition, Apple's first priority in swapping to Silicon was performance-per-watt, which they can now deliver all on their own even better than could Intel; the fact that it's now harder to run Windows on modern Macs was hardly a blip in Apple's decision matrix.
This might well be true. I know that some older Macs can be installed from USB -- that's how I installed Windows 10 on a 2010 Mini that I have sitting upstairs... but that Mini is the server model without an optical drive, so maybe the rules are different there. That's still not to say that Apple has always been consistent in this regard, since (as I've established above) Windows compatibility was always a fairly low priority for them.
As an aside: take this tidbit for what it's worth, particularly since you seem to have already found a solution to your problem... but if you haven't already done so, you may at some point want to consider trying to run your legacy Adobe software under Windows 10 using Windows 8 compatibility mode. It obviously won't get you to a fully supported OS, but it would at least be a step in the right direction -- and Windows 11 has a similar feature as well. Just food for thought.
