Yeah there really isn’t any replacement for After Effects (well I guess there is Motion, but even Apple seems to forget that exists).

I’m not super confident that Affinity will be able to do it. Feature development seems to have really, really slowed down. The gap between Adobe and Affinity has grown, rather than shrank. Yeah Affinity’s software has a lot of the same main features, but it’s like MS Word where there is a long tail of very useful features where hardly anyone uses all of them, but everyone uses a few. Affinity hasn’t even come close to integrating those kinds of features.

I'm hoping Figma leans a bit on the illustrator market, because their app is phenomenal. The vector editor is great, but is clearly biased towards UI development. If they could release a parallel product that is even close to feature parity with Illustrator, I'd be very happy.

Figma’s selling point are collaboration, UI focus as you mentioned and being a webapp (no install needed)

I think there’s much to be done to compete with a general purpose vector tool like Illustrator.

What do you think of the ON1 suite? Their marketing department is quite full of themselves. It also heavily features content aware deletion, filters, and options to replace a sky with some fancy one.

It’s an OK competitor to Lightroom, though I prefer Adobe Camera Raw’s rendering in most cases.

But Photoshop is harder to replace.

clip studio pretty handedly outperforms illustrator for vector images and publishing at this point imo.