I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom).
One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows.
Meanwhile open source image editors go out of their way to have keybinds, workflows and button placement that deviate significantly from Photoshop. Smells strongly of NIH.
Don't hold your breath for Darktable; the devs are hellbent on being as user-hostile as possible. It needs to be forked or replaced to make any progress.
Somebody forked it and was trying to do just that; I don't know the status of that project.
I am only an occasional blender user, but I have been using it a long time. since 1.7
the main key binds I have always used have not changed. tab, g, r s, e, b, A, f, ctl-click to add points.
Are you telling me those are the industry standard keybinds (surprised pikachu face)
One thing I always felt blender did better than the "industry standard tools" was it's quick/natural workflow. I have not used Maya since collage in 2000 but back then it was very clunky compared to blender for quick vertex based editing. My theory is more that the "industry standard tools" caught up to blender. but by then blender had a bad reputation as being quirky, so the "big redesign" was more a press-release. Give it a menu bar make it dark mode and most importantly got to cure that bad-reputation so tell everyone it is completely different now.
What the heck happened to Photoshop and Illustrator (and the whole Adobe suite)? They monochromed all of their icons and removed most of their text and tooltips.
As a casual user, I used to be able to use their tools fairly proficiently, but now I find them virtually unusable.
One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows.
Meanwhile open source image editors go out of their way to have keybinds, workflows and button placement that deviate significantly from Photoshop. Smells strongly of NIH.