Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
about ten years back I got my parents photoshop elements 11 as a present; it was the best thing since sliced bread. They'd seen the stuff I did (with Gimp) manipulating the family photos, they thought it looked like fun and they had hundreds of old slides/photos they wanted to scan and fix.
Elements 11 was a joy to use, made it easy to in-paint and erase glitches in the scans; all was well. I liked it too-it did smart stuff like seam carving.
A couple of years later, Adobe pushed me to elements 12. IIRC, that was the one where the subscription came in. I thought, that sounds bad but if it's advancing on the fantastic thing they'd had out before, it's worth the money. But no. It was completely unusable, all of the advanced features were gone, and the licensing was an intrusive nightmare. Honestly I'd have burned my computer to the ground rather than use that again.
That was the end of them for me. A product so bad that I'd paid full price and deleted it without a refund the next day, and would recommend no-one else goes near for 50,000 years. How the heck did they go so wrong so fast?
> If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re-up for another year on CC.
If you're doing motion design, I'd agree, I guess you're stuck with Adobe. In the realm of print, we are so close to never needing them again. Affinity is great. The only problem is that vector groups are lost when you need to import or export to Illustrator/PDF. Adobe is fully aware of this and makes their bespoke file format as difficult as possible to parse. When you're working with a dozen designers and 6 separate print houses for different things, you have no choice. It's the most monopolistic system I can think of, worse than anything Microsoft did with Windows and IE in the 90s. It's pure extortion as they take away features. And they know it. Adobe is doomed. Their entire attitude as a company is one of stripping as much as they can out of their current market dominance without adding any value. Adobe will not last another few years as far as cornering the print market. But right now, no one in the industry wants to be the first to bail on them. Everyone would love to.
Unfortunately, PDF seems to be as good as it gets, which destroys any grouping done in Illustrator. (When reading .ai files, I'm pretty sure Affinity just reads the PDF data). The best workaround I've found is to "sequence" all groups into layers first in Illustrator and then deal with them as separate layers in Affinity. Tedious and time consuming.
Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.
