I agree entirely that the out of the box experience of the subscription plugin can be improved a lot! That said you do have a lot of power today if you wish to get your hands a bit dirty.
We do have outlets here, you can create a theme component to add the link.
I really like the flow of “seeing that categories exist” in the home page and having some special iconography to say that it is “subscriber” content.
Then non subscribers can click on it to be prompted to join to see the content.
@blake did we have anything like this in the plugin?