I think the dilemma here is trying and failing. Many of us tried the open source alternatives and failed, there's nothing really useful to say about that. It mi

I think the dilemma here is trying and failing. Many of us tried the open source alternatives and failed, there's nothing really useful to say about that. It might just be a failure on our part, i.e., someone else with a better approach might succeed. But what you really need is someone who's an expert in Photoshop, to move to an open source alternative and succeed and then weigh the advantages, and this needs to happen in aggregate to start getting a real sense of what the difference are. Note that I don't think even the commercial Affinity apps have crossed this bar, so it's nothing against open source, it's just photo editing at the high-end is just a one-tool market. Contrast this to Final Cut Pro X vs. Premiere vs. DaVinci Resolve, where you can find countless comparisons of the individual advantages of each of those platforms, that's a market with healthy competition and options. Same with DAWs, same with 3D packages.