Part of the problem GIMP has is that they chase perfect ideas at the expense of good ones. Adobe don't. The Adobe codebase is cruft that has taken a similarly

Part of the problem GIMP has is that they chase perfect ideas at the expense of good ones. Adobe don't. The Adobe codebase is cruft that has taken a similarly long time to shake out. Lightroom was seemingly built like a skunkworks project almost like a desktop webapp (scripting around a core renderer, SQLite, simpler mode-oriented GUI) to avoid the intransigence and friction of Photoshop's codebase. But this is what GIMP is up against. Cruft that earns money, that is driving not just what users want but how they think about what they want. For GIMP to be more successful it doesn't need live non-global filters like blurs, but it would have been enormously beneficial to the project if it had global adjustment layers, say, 15 years ago. Then youtube would have been filled with tutorials, there would have been momentum around the project, some commercial support interest, etc. Kicking the can down the road has consequences. This great Ondsel blog article about how difficult it is to merge major changes into an open source project goes into it in some detail: https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/ https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-topological-naming/ Some decisions need to be taken at the right time; if you don't, you need a whole separate kind of energy to get them done without stopping everyone else. (The successful Affinity suite is a result of taking some right decisions back in 2010 or 2011)