If you do not realize by now that the rebate game is
just that then you have learned a valuable lesson.
Never count on receiving a rebate.
Vendors pretend to have a "sale" price fueled by rebates
because they know that a significant percentage or buyers will never send in the
rebate, they can ignore/lose a high percentage of rebates and never get
complaints and, finally, consumers have absolutely no recourse when a rebate is
ignored.
For products that sell at Adobe's price points,
including Elements, Adobe runs its business like they were a second
tier, knock-off oriental carpet seller.
That attitude may explain why fundamental programming
bugs persist through several revisions of high end products, like the Bridge
portion of Photoshop CS3 and CS4, and why they will only update the raw
converter for the newest version of Photoshop every time a dSLR manufacturer
minutely changes its raw file format.