Apropos of nothing, GIMP is pretty darn good, no charge, no subscription. Ditto Darktable, Inkscape et. al.
GIMP could be pretty darn good if they gave 20 UX designers another 10 years to redo their entire UX. As is, it's a usability nightmare. Whenever I'm forced to use it, it feels like I spend 70% of my time fighting with the horrible UI, 25% of the time Googling how to do trivial things because it's very much not obvious, and 5% doing what I actually want.
Free office apps are a great achievement but you seem to get what you pay for.
But I miss the sessions where each artist present would have two hours to demo making something with the express message: tell us what you hate, and we're not allowed to tell you "oh, but you could do this using that."