Good to hear that its not pure hard-headedness that caused this. Sure, but when I look at the development of image editing tools in the 90ies then vector shape

Good to hear that its not pure hard-headedness that caused this. Sure, but when I look at the development of image editing tools in the 90ies then vector shapes and layer pretty much was widespread by 1998. If I were to guess then the functionality just came with support for TT Fonts and became a standard feature for image manipulation applications. Again I tried really hard to make GIMP work for me - I still found myself hunting for the right tool icon time and time again (I think something is fundamentally wrong there but I cannot with certainty say what) This might be where the UI criticism comes from. I bet you would learn the symbols in the end and . I still got so annoyed by the save function insisting to save as some weird format I didn't want to use that I had to patch that out. But then in the end what killed it for me was the vector lines thing.