I don't think it's worth comparing it with Adobe, since the developers have never really competed with it. It's its own thing, and the decisions and developmen

I don't think it's worth comparing it with Adobe, since the developers have never really competed with it. It's its own thing, and the decisions and development roadmap stand on their own. Cinepaint got stuck as the fork diverged increasingly from the mainline code. They ended up on with a branch of GIMP 1.0.x using GTK+ 1.x, and the porting effort to bring it up-to-date with the GIMP mainline and GTK+ 2.x was insurmountable. I wasn't aware of the switch to FLTK, but last I looked FLTK was indeed primitive and dated. But very functional. The Cinepaint developers had very specific commercial priorities, somewhat at odds with the GIMP developers, and if porting to FLTK got them a working product to satisfy their needs, I can certainly see that being a reasonable choice. If anything, it really makes a point toward the maintainability of C GTK+ applications (many of us have been there; I ported over to C++/Qt myself).