I cannot reply wrt. to the financial issue today. When I ordered 25 campus licenses two decades ago the price was at some hunded $ and I financed it as a part of the departments student PC pool , primarily used for my courses in Mathematical Physics + CAS. Today the licenses are updated and widely used by everyone in the staff via home use licenses.
Today the ever growing Mathematica complex with prices in the thousands, I just can afford a private student or emeritus licence renewal together with the next hardware generation.
Of course, one can not ask German students to pay such an amount for just one course. In Germany, school and university is free of charge for everyone, it simply does not work on a private profit base.
The other quaestion with an index: Some years ago I prepared an index for a ready written manuscript by three lines im Mathematica , taking the word list with positions, selecting the Complement with the word list from another faculty. There is no need of intelligence.
In the case of a book, the publisher feeds the wordlist into a professional editor system. The problem with non-English languages are the flection forms, but in most cases ignoring the end of words works for a Union. So what? Finally a true professional has to do the last editoral steps.
