After using Adobe stuff for many years, my stubbornness, with regards to subscriptions and cloud things, led me to buy the various bits of desktop Affinity software. I think they were only about £30 a piece, which isn't bad, but you really aren't buying Photoshop or Illustrator. Designer is a bit of a kludge, and V1 did seem like a work-in-progress. I was hoping a knife tool would be added before we got to V2.
There are techniques I'd been using for a long time, complicated little tasks with, on the face of it, simple results, that I wasn't able to reproduce in AD without a lot of thinking and farting around. For better or worse, this pushed me to change things up and explore other methods, and now I've learnt how to achieve things with programming, whether that's Processing or little things for Blender.
I know people operating businesses who've just stuck with an old computer running an old non-subscription version of the Adobe software they depend on. They don't really need anything from modern versions (some have been doing things since the '70s, adding computers to the mix in the '90s, and their techniques have not really changed all that much), and its Affinity kinda-equivalent is missing some little thing.
For me, just looking at the changes, V2 isn't terribly compelling. There are things I was doing ages ago in Illustrator that don't seem to be in Designer v2, like vector pattern swatches. Once you really get going with it, the absence of features or rough edges (see post in this thread about dashed borders) will leave you frustrated.
All that said, good on them for creating this affordable software, with no subscription.
Illustrator is the undefeated champ, and I've loved it deeply since 1987. You're right that nothing can replace it at the high-end. For that audience, a $20/month subscription for Illustrator or an all-apps subscription is a given.
Still, this Affinity upgrade is an insta-upgrade for me. On a practical level, I'm lucky enough to be able to "vote with my dollars" to support small developers and non-subscription software. From a creative perspective, sometimes it's helpful (or just fun!) to work with different tools.
There are techniques I'd been using for a long time, complicated little tasks with, on the face of it, simple results, that I wasn't able to reproduce in AD without a lot of thinking and farting around. For better or worse, this pushed me to change things up and explore other methods, and now I've learnt how to achieve things with programming, whether that's Processing or little things for Blender.
I know people operating businesses who've just stuck with an old computer running an old non-subscription version of the Adobe software they depend on. They don't really need anything from modern versions (some have been doing things since the '70s, adding computers to the mix in the '90s, and their techniques have not really changed all that much), and its Affinity kinda-equivalent is missing some little thing.
For me, just looking at the changes, V2 isn't terribly compelling. There are things I was doing ages ago in Illustrator that don't seem to be in Designer v2, like vector pattern swatches. Once you really get going with it, the absence of features or rough edges (see post in this thread about dashed borders) will leave you frustrated.
All that said, good on them for creating this affordable software, with no subscription.