I liked it overall and I liked what Serif has built it around it, even going so far as to offer printed documentation (the Workbooks) and the beautiful Affinity Spotlight website which is a really wonderful website unto itself. And there was the obvious benefit of the low cost and perpetual license.
The featureset was adequate for me and the interface initially won me over.
But I ended up moving away for two main reasons:
1. It tended to feel sluggish as hell. 2. Frequent crashes in the middle of work. 3. Lacking basic productivity capabilities, e.g. no ability to interact with the layers pane (rename, reorder etc.) using the keyboard shortcuts.
I was running it on an i7-7700k with GTX 1080 Ti and yet there was often a perceptible delay between clicking something and the action occurring. Even expanding layers in the layer pane, or double clicking a text field... there was a very small but perceptible delay.
More serious though was (3) especially combined with (1)... little things like tidying up file layers were vastly more time consuming than they should have been.
I was suggested to try Figma and have never looked back. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything and all interactions feel instantaneous... even though it runs within the browser! The first time I used it I was astounded and then made the switch within weeks. Haven’t run Affinity in over 18 months and it would take a lot for me to try it again.
I now run a Linux desktop anyway so not really even an option...