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QGIS is an incredible success of the FOSS world.

Its probably mostly down to the ridiculous pricing demands of the other GIS providers (primarly ESRI, but also MapInfo and others). But it gives hope for us FOSS supporters.

Who knows - maybe one day the industry standard may shift from others like Adobe CS also?

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QGIS is incredible. I have two geography degrees and all they taught us was ESRI stuff. One class with GRASS and QGIS, 7 years of ArcGIS. Only when I graduated and no longer had access to their insanely expensive licenses that I rediscovered QGIS. Because it's not the smoothest ux, it really pushed me towards the programmatic API. As a result I became a better GIS expert than I ever would have. I do robotics + GIS these days and QGIS is front and centre in my toolbox.

I don’t know if it progresses to the point of kickbacks often, but ESRI heavily promotes their projects in education in order to lock students into their ecosystem as early as possible.

Just like Microsoft or Autodesk

Also Inkscape is another incredible open source success, though the OP used Illustrator, some one with similar tasks could have easily utilized Inkscape at zero cost.

Add scribus to that list as well. And Darktable. Immensely useful things.

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