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However, I would argue that putting some effort into making the software easier for people to use goes a long way in solving that problem. If multiple people are having a similar issue with my software, that's a signal to me that I need to do something better.

② "why not just copy photoshop" is really the same genre of Idea Guy post as "why not just make a pokémon game with every region in it", but software isn't often recognized as a creative endeavor so a lot of serious professionals nod along (and then i look like a lunatic for finding it grating)

Remember as well that UX is subjective and has many dimensions. Some people prefer to have direct access to a lot of complex features for efficiency, others prefer a clean and simple layout to avoid being overwhelmed. Both are valid. We're biased towards learnability for software we don't know well.

There's also the issue that much of the FOSS userbase is deeply hostile to telemetry as a concept. And making it opt-in rather than opt-out also means that, if you do have telemetry, the sample is the people sophisticated enough to know how useful telemetry is, the opposite of your targets.

Another thing people ALWAYS gloss over is that Photoshop has bad UX as well. More people are just familiar with it. I learned on GIMP and got used to it, and liked it. I decided to "get serious" and tried learning Photoshop and it was MISERABLE, the workflow was backwards and everything was hidden

I learned the GIMP in like 1999 (RTFM & experiment), with no prior pro image software experience. When I've attempted to touch pro software, I've been extremely lost & found it unintuitive. Familiarity provides a huge bias about what feels natural & sensible. I think people can forget that

… and that the effort was “just time wasted by pixel pushers who can’t write their own patches,” etc. Things have improved over the (decade+!) since then but the UX team was p badly burnt by it, and it taught me a lot about the fact that simply resourcing something doesn’t change a community.

and like sure it’s valid that they’re overworked and their priorities are elsewhere but it’s always been an attitude that shuts down my willingness to collaborate and actually work on the code because having the source is different than being able to work on an existing complex codebase

Then why are people recommending it as a tool that professionals should use? Feels like trolling at that point

well I imagine the name doesn’t help haha

The anger at the GIMP is a bit overblown, but at the same time, someone saying that it's a easy drop in replacement for... any other paint program, welp. That's an easy person to dunk on.

yeah and gimp probably missed the time window for that to happen because none of the developers were ready or able to do that level of fundraising for it now it's too late and there are a bunch of other free/freemium alternatives

Blender used to have a 'user friendy' fork as well. The existance of these sorts of mods or forks for a piece of software is kinda a bad thing.