I was a bit surprised to find that quite a few of my friends who traditionally used Photoshop and Illustrator in their work either have transitioned to Affinity

I was a bit surprised to find that quite a few of my friends who traditionally used Photoshop and Illustrator in their work either have transitioned to Affinity products, or are making a conscious effort to look for alternatives. I would have thought it would take longer and/or that people would be extremely tied to their tools. But you do make a point. Often there is no obvious alternative. And changing tools has a cost. Mostly because they want to pay for software and then not have it stop working on them for silly reasons, but also due to a general "bullshit fatigue" with Adobe. It isn't a company that cares a great deal about its users. I did something similar a few years ago. After Oracle ended up buying Sun, I really wanted to stop using Java since I didn't feel Oracle was a company that I would want to do business with. However, it took me several years to transition away from Java. I really liked Java. Finding a new programming language that is suitable for the kind of work you do, has enough of a community etc. isn't just a matter of deciding to move. You need somewhere to move to. Eventually Go evolved to where it fit my needs really well, so I managed to make the transition. 2-3 years later and I haven't touched Java since. (Which was somewhat unexpected. I didn't expect changing languages would be that fast, but it coincided well with new projects etc). As for switching editors, VSCode managed to attract 2.6M monthly users in roughly 2 years. If you believe estimates of how many developers that are in the world, and you squint a bit when comparing numbers, that's roughly in the neighborhood of 10% of the global developer population. My intuition says you are right. The data seems seems to suggest it wants to disagree with both of us :-)