Another comment mentioned GIMP may have assumptions of bad UX within their codebase which makes me think about long-lived and large scale projects like this in general. The technical debt of GIMP has been slowly amassing (like all projects) since 1995 (wow!) and I assume that as every year goes by it gets increasingly difficult to do a large scale re-write of any part of the logic.
Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to "one-up" it over something.
How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable?
Tools like Photopea[1] come along and throw a fresh perspective at things all the time, these tools never have the breadth and depth of feature support that GIMP has but basically always manage to "one-up" it over something.
How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? How long until it attains the aesthetic coherence necessary to win people over visually? I love GIMP, but is the battle against 20 years of technical debt even winnable?
[1]: https://www.photopea.com/