I've used Affinity products a lot over the last few years - Photo and Designer specifically (moreso Designer). Sorry in advance for what will be a negative comm

I've used Affinity products a lot over the last few years - Photo and Designer specifically (moreso Designer). Sorry in advance for what will be a negative comment. For those unaware, these are $50 USD one-time payment alternatives for Adobe products; Photoshop -> Photo, Illustrator -> Designer. I think Photo is the more developed product, but Designer is what I really need on a day to day basis and it lacks a LOT of the basic features that Illustrator has. The rendering engine is pretty poorly implemented. Rotating an object oftentimes fills the entire AABB of the rotated shape with black, which also persists into the layer previews as well. Rotating around causes this black box to flicker. It's been reported before and they do little about it. Exports are rough too. Exporting to raster formats causes insane amounts of blur that are not present in other editors. The developers tell you to increase resolution, as if I don't know what I'm doing. Increasing the resolution is not the solution to everything, and it seems like crisp edges are not well handled in either product when dealing with vector objects. The constraint system is entirely bugged out and doesn't work for more than a few trivial (and thus useless) cases. Some of the panes (e.g. the guide pane) cause crashes when opened. Reproducible every time, reported more than a year ago, to my knowledge hasn't been fixed. People posting bugs or feature requests on the forums are met with "come on guys stop being so mean"-type comments when we're all paying customers too and are a bit miffed about simple things causing our projects to crash, cause rendering issues, or waste time in other ways. Further, some of the devs' responses have been lackluster, vaporous promises or, in some cases, outright rude and dismissive. Looking at the glassdoor and some other review sites, it seems the company has a real problem with project management and directional focus, which seems to all fall in line with how the product is perceived after doing some pretty extensive work with it. Overall, sure, you'll get your money's worth, but I would have happily paid more if it meant getting a more stable product, honestly. Use if you're in a pinch, but don't think it'll be a cheaper, more grassroots drop-in replacement to CS (even if you don't need e.g. content-aware capabilities and the like, which of course Affinity doesn't have). Even basic usage can be a real PITA. Beats GIMP and Inkscape any day of the week, though.