With all due respect, what you seem to be saying here is that you can't understand why UX is important to the target audience... A professional artist has to b

With all due respect, what you seem to be saying here is that you can't understand why UX is important to the target audience... A professional artist has to be able to work swiftly and reliably. Gimp's rough interface and stability issues present significant challenges to that kind of workflow. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of feedback needed to drive Gimp to competency, regardless of how well the project's foundation satisfies a person's idealistic impulses. As an aside, holding up that single feature as proof is hardly an argument, especially when a package like imagemagick is available and (arguably) better at the xcf conversion example.