That's only true if the engineers are not allowed to copy/steal from existing designs. There are plenty that are better than GIMP (e.g. Photoshop, Krita, ...).

That's only true if the engineers are not allowed to copy/steal from existing designs. There are plenty that are better than GIMP (e.g. Photoshop, Krita, ...). If nothing else, make it easy to build a layer on top so that Photoshop can be replicated nearly exactly.