Seemed like you always needed a trio of main apps. In the graphic design market of the 90s, it was Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator. To a lesser extent it was Pagemaker, Photoshop and Freehand.
Pagemaker was always garbage compared to QuarkXPress or even Corel Ventura. But Adobe really improved on it with InDesign, and a lot of places I knew who used Quark promptly switched.
FreeHand was particularly useful because of its integration with Flash. A lot of animation shops would use FreeHand because it was a better editor than Flash, but then import drawings into Flash for animation.
Also, every one of the editors had sort of a recognizable style. Adobe Illustrator was perceived as being more "prestigious", "imported" and most people I knew at the time who used it were Mac users (which was expensive for an artist) so that also probably left a mark.
Contrast today with when you probably had one or two dozen word processing programs with significant market share.
And the alien.
I was sure I was going to use PageMaker for 10 hours a day for the rest of my life but you learn a little HTML and you realized that I wasn't ever going to be the next David Carson (NO ONE would ever be the next David Carson) so f- it.