Note: I obviously don't use this suite so I don't know the true benefits of the software.
Care to list what a web design application really needs? It would be a big help. I've kind of referenced Jason Santa Maria's "A Real Web Design Application" article (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-applic...) for some of my goals with my app...
Link: http://www.edit-room.com/
Maybe it will take some time to get there, but it's good to have goals, and incremental improvement is the way to go, at least for a solo developer effort :)
Fireworks does seem expensive, but my main complaint is how bloated it is. There are tons of tools I don't need and some operations take longer than you would think they should. For example on the OS X version of Fireworks, clicking the close file button makes the whole app lockup for about a second while it tries to bring up the dialog to ask if you want to save or not. Not a huge deal on it's own
Basically I would love to see a tool that competes with Fireworks for the ui design. Preferably it would be a bit cheaper, but I am much more concerned that it has a more targeted feature set and doesn't feel sluggish while using it.
GIMP: http://gimp.org - Gimp is for doing photo editing work. People hate on the gimp for not have 16 bit color support, but this point should be moot for the overwhelming majority of users. I've used GIMP to edit photos, then sold them on iStockphoto where they have been used in advertising.
I've been using gimp for ~10 years and I've never come across something that I can't do with it. (Including the "content aware fill" thing from about a year ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/96). I'm a pretty big GIMP fan.
People also hate on it's interface. If you've grown up on photoshop, sure, but I can work faster in GIMP than I can in anything (including photoshop).
Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - I use inkscape every single day for doing advertising materials at my job. I've done ads that have been published in nationally-syndicated magazines with this, and have done work for enormous, internationally-recognized brands with this. Inkscape is a fantastic piece of software.
Scribus: http://scribus.org - Scribus is for doing page layouts. While I don't use it extensively anymore, I have used it for publishing work in the past. It is a fantastic, very complete piece of software that will do everything that you want to do with it.
This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.
That depends on the work you need to do. I don't pirate software on principle, so I used to use exactly those three applications, along with OpenOffice, for my everyday needs. However, when I started needing tools to do real work for real money, my perspective changed: the glaring weaknesses in the OSS software compared to the serious professional tools made it easily worth dropping £1,000+ on things like CS5.
In the interests of fairness, since "glaring weaknesses" is a somewhat strong term, I will list a few of the more obvious ones:
- No serious typography support (e.g., using OpenType features; flexible antialiasing for screen graphics; flexible H&J settings).
- No serious colour support (e.g., integrating Pantone spot colours).
- No layer styles.
The Adobe apps have their problems, to be sure, but on even these basic points the "competition" is lagging many years behind.
Actually, the one thing i think most people are paying for when it comes to indesign is adobe's type engine, which behaves predictably and also supports the kitchen sink of opentype features. It's easy to dismiss ot support as a convenience function (it is at some level), but it's the killer feature for any typographic application where you want to use the full range of type available to you in the font (family?) you paid oh so much money for.
I once designed using a version of futura that had the small caps & osfs in the glyphs menu (untagged!) and was livid when i had to set nearly a paragraph of text by inserting each one at a time. Since the last time i checked when i was in grad school [1], this was still an outstanding issue in scribus (shaky opentype smcp/dlig/salt support) and it's really the one that kept me from ditching indesign. As it was, i would probably have jumped ship and used latex/xetex had i not been trying to individually rag each line.
It's not like you can't make nice work in scribus, but it may also be more convenient to do it in a program that has solid support (and mostly tuned ui) for the features that many typographers use.
I tend to use Autodesk Sketchbook + Pixelmator for most of my graphic work.
For someone like me, Pixelmator has some serious drawbacks. For one thing the pressure sensitivity curve isn't quite right for the pens. Worse yet, it often interprets rapidly drawn curves as straight lines! It also had some serious UI problems which I understand have improved somewhat in the most recent version. If I had to chose, I'd take Pixelmator over GIMP for simple everyday tasks, but seriously, the only reasonable replacement I've seen for what I want out of Photoshp would be Corel Painter.
I don't think it's an accident that Wacom has worked out a deal with both companies and ships PSE and Painter Essentials with their Bamboo tablets.
So far, I've been really pleased with the software wacom bundled in, but if there is a weakness it would be a good pencil sketching interface, as opposed to painting. Especially the smudge feature on PSE feels like it's for paints, not pencil.
Unfortunately, it looks like Sketchbook licenses are only usable in a single country, which doesn't work for me. Pretty much anything on my laptop is going to get used in China, Taiwan and the US.
Summary: It's probably not that any given customer actually uses even a third of the features, but that for any customer there is a feature that is very important to them, and those "I need X" features span the whole set of creative suite functionality.
Adobe and Autodesk have both effectively monopolized their niches. When Adobe acquired Macromedia that was pretty much it for viable competitors. When Autodesk got both Maya and Softimage, likewise.
There is simply no credible replacement for Flash, if you need to author Flash. I hope that Apple has dented Flash enough to make it irrelevant moving forward.
Photoshop has so many deep features that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously shaking it in the next few years. (Photoshop Elements has more functionality than Photoshop's high profile "competitors" and is given away free with scanners).
As for the rest of Adobe's empire -- it's pretty brittle. Illustrator is actually pretty dated. Dreamweaver -- well some folks like it. Fireworks -- it's the rotting carcass of XRes, an unsuccessful Photoshop competitor. After Effects has tons of competition, and its killer feature is CS integration. Premiere ditto (not even sure it has good CS integration). Acrobat is a joke -- it should be Adobe's crown jewel but it seems like almost anyone can write a better Acrobat clone than Adobe.
And it's not just cheaper, it's less buggy and faster.
Adobe CS isn't just unpopular because of its pricing, it's really inconsistent, painful software.
To anybody reading this: I highly recommend Pixelmator. It has a free trial, check it out.