Your point is valid, but also incredibly narrow, the type of tunnel vision that seems to affect all computer using professional artists, who somehow started thinking they were the majority of computer users. Not only is that not the case, but you're such a tiny minority that Apple didn't shy away from dropping you all, dropping software like Aperture, simplifying Final Cut and orienting it toward hobbyists and slashing its price down to a measly $300, and all those moves are coming from the company that used to be known as the friendliest toward artists. Your kind keeps harping about "ah, my firewire port" and so and so and Apple literally doesn't care. You're not the target audience anymore, you represent nothing.
The quality of open source software is, by far, when you consider most needs, more than adequate and often superior to closed source.
Most of the examples you give aren't even close to being evidence of a superiority of closed source in a debate of closed vs open, they are examples of the superiority of a few specific graphic powerhouses like Adobe. Is there anything like Photoshop in the world of closed source software? It is the only one. Closed source doesn't magically make things better. There are plenty of closed source competitors to Photoshop that aren't even close to what GIMP achieves, even more so with that plugin :
http://gmic.eu/
Which replicates almost all the most important functions of modern Photoshop. What GIMP misses, is not power, but productivity, by missing non destructive editing. On the other hand, with something like gmic, gimp is far, far more powerful than ANY other piece of software that isn't called Photoshop. Considering the extremely small amount of people who are actively working on GIMP and its plugins and that none of their are paid for it, I'd say they do an incredible job.
Everything you can do in Photoshop, you absolutely can do with GIMP, for eg things like these :
http://blog.patdavid.net/2014/02/getting-around-in-gimp-gmic...
Work just as good. If you're not a professional working on deadline who truly needs a productivity boost through constant modification of something you're commissioned to produce (which is where Non Destructive Editing shines best), you don't really need anything other than the GIMP.
So I'll quote your first paragraph and throw it back at you:
>>This is only true in the very narrow segment of 'tools for geeks by geeks', 'tools that big software companies need but don't provide a competitive edge/need to be OSS for adoption so they opensource'
Your views are only true in the very narrow segment of 'tools for artists that cost big bucks which represent exactly 0.01% of the software used in the entire world'. If most people don't have a use for the things you mention, like code editors and compilers, they don't have a use for things like Photoshop either.
And if we're going by % of software in use, there are far more web servers out there running open source programs that there will ever be photoshop installations. Much less packages like Maya which fill an even much smaller niche. Niche, a word you seem fond of using for talking about OSS. What is more niche between a web browser and maya?