Seemed like you always needed a trio of main apps. In the graphic design market of the 90s, it was Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. To a lesser extent it was Pagemaker, Photoshop and Freehand.
This is very dependent on the country or language of your audience, but also Apple computers availability. In Israel, for example, FreeHand was by far the most popular tool for vector editing because of easier integration with right-to-left writing. Former Soviet Union countries almost exclusively relied on CorelDraw. Not sure why, but my guess is it was somehow easier to pirate it.
Pagemaker was always garbage compared to QuarkXPress or even Corel Ventura. But Adobe really improved on it with InDesign, and a lot of places I knew who used Quark promptly switched.
FreeHand was particularly useful because of its integration with Flash. A lot of animation shops would use FreeHand because it was a better editor than Flash, but then import drawings into Flash for animation.
Also, every one of the editors had sort of a recognizable style. Adobe Illustrator was perceived as being more "prestigious", "imported" and most people I knew at the time who used it were Mac users (which was expensive for an artist) so that also probably left a mark.
In general, professional/prosumer local desktop software has mostly collapsed into one (sometimes two) products per category and the categories themselves have become fairly rigidly defined. There's other more mainstream consumer packages but I'm guessing most of those are increasingly marginalized by open source and hosted services of various sorts.
Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.
The only thing I remember about Quark is that Quark 4 seemed super outdated and old, but it's what the industry standardized on and Quark 5 totally bombed.
And the alien.
I was sure I was going to use PageMaker for 10 hours a day for the rest of my life but you learn a little HTML and you realized that I wasn't ever going to be the next David Carson (NO ONE would ever be the next David Carson) so f- it.
XRes was interesting, it would do all the imaging operations at reduced resolution to make them work quickly, and then when you saved the document it would perform all the actual work at full res. It sort of worked, but saving could appear to be really slow.
