You made me chuckle! I was raised on open source by a software engineer. I was using gimp on Ubuntu when I was 7 or 8 years old. I understand your sentiment completely, but you need to understand that time is money, and if something like layer blending takes even a few more clicks in gimp than photoshop, it is not ready to compete. Of course, you can think whatever you want about software you don’t rely on for a living. The rest of the world will smile and move on with reality.

This is definitely the take of someone who doesn’t need the full capabilities of such tools to make a living.