It was for me. I'm not a professional photographer and I learned GIMP first (because it was free and worked on Linux). GIMP was never lacking anything I needed

It was for me. I'm not a professional photographer and I learned GIMP first (because it was free and worked on Linux). GIMP was never lacking anything I needed for some light amateur work or web dev work. Photoshop might be easier to use from 0, but anything that was moderately complicated or repetitive I simply scripted away. I have almost 18 years of script-fu plugins written in Scheme and Python.