I am a professional artist and I just wanna note that the idea of users being able to customize the fuck out of their tools is all well and good, but realistica

I am a professional artist and I just wanna note that the idea of users being able to customize the fuck out of their tools is all well and good, but realistically: It takes multiple years of focused effort to get good at the other skills involved in using a tool. And it takes no small amount of investment of time and energy to get to the point where you have the programming skills to modify the tool. Plus of course the inner calculations of "will trying to modify this thing be likely to find any success before I have spent more time trying to hack it than I will ever save by doing this" need to at least look like they will come up favorably. I mean, someone in the community is probably gonna have that combination, this past month I've been looking at picking up Adobe Animate for the first time in like 15 years to do some animation, and I went looking for plugins for it and found a few paid plugins made by a dude who started working in the animation scene around the same time I did, and never left it; this man has clearly found a lot of pain points in the process of cranking out the footage in Flash/Animate and built plugins to fix those holes long before Adobe could be bothered (and it sounds like there are a lot of unlicensed copies of his plugins floating around studios, too), and if I find this one animation gig I'm being coaxed out of retirement to be enough fun that I wanna take a few more, you can bet your ass that I'm gonna give this dude like sixty bucks for his well-polished patches in Adobe's UI rather than spending the time getting up to speed on making Animate plugins. And this is coming from someone who hangs out on HN and has a tidy little collection of homebrew scripts for Illustrator, the art tool she spends most of her creative time in.