Is it because the UX is good or because changing it is impossible without the users rebelling en masse?
The closest example I cam think of, which people inside Adobe most certainly know about, is the failed attempts by Quark Xpress to update their product in the late 90s/early 00s, which led to them losing a 95% market share position to Adobe InDesign. You do not mess with the tools that a loud and creative community rely upon to get their jobs done.
There were a number of factors here - outsourcing engineering leading to a disastrously buggy 4.0, then failing to move to OS X for years after the market was ready to, hostile and arrogant approach to customers ("where else will they go?") and finally the misbegotten attempt to turn a DTP app into a web design tool. InDesign 1 was fairly clunky, but everyone was desperate to escape.
It's an Amiga-like shambles of mismanagement that wasted an early lead; I am still nostalgic for both tbh.
The problem was everybody liked PageMaker7 and nobody wanted something new.
How about Audacity? The clowns simply bought CoolEdit and renamed it. Very innovative.
But how do you know a UX isn't broken, when you've only seen one iteration of it you're whole life and have nothing else to compare it to? Kind of like Plato's Cave Allegory.
You have to try new things, and if you see them fail, then you know which one was the best.
And sometimes there's good enough and you should leave it alone. QWERTY isn't optimal but it's not very far from it.
A/B testing to a few users only works in web-app front-ends, not in professional tools where all single end-user releases need to look and act exactly the same.
Shipping to only a handful of users wasn't a thing in the era of "Gold CD" releases, and even in the era of the internet updates, nobody will want to take part in A/B testing and end up with a different Photoshop UX than what his colleague is using, so you either ship to all or none.
So it seems Photoshop's UI is more of a cause of inertia and resistance to change, rather than nailing right the first time.
The rare exception is single-purpose interfaces where increasing one singular interaction is an end in itself, e.g. a marketing page, but that's a pretty unique case that is very far removed from a productivity tool.
Shipping to mass market is a bad way to get feedback.
And I'm pretty sure an alphabetical keyboard would do much more harm than good, if that's the implied alternative.
/end rant
I am not native but I feel pleasure from using Dvorak and chatting with no need to look at keyboard. I am trying to spread acknowledgement about Dvorak among young folks and those who agreed to learn feel the same boost. The difference is unimaginable for those who already has some muscle memory for anything related to Qwerty such as Ctrl-C. So the difference is between creating the layout for touchtyping goals and creating the layout for any other ones.
I have not found many tools that work as well and make productivity great.
They simply refuse to revise anything in the interface—they just keep adding. It's the software equivalent of hoarding.
[0] Save/Save as, Export As, Save for Web (Legacy)
Now if they'd just integrate the tinypng plugin that was deprecated in 2023 - https://help.tinify.com/help/deprecation-of-the-photoshop-pl...
Anecdotally, SFW is the result of converting Adobe ImageReady into a plugin. When IR was originally created, many of its sources were split off from Photoshop to get it off the ground. So now we have two variants of “the same” sources for many files- one evolving in Photoshop, and the other frozen in time in Save for Web.
Part of me feels like it's... either very optimal for masses to learn because very few PSers (outside of photography) I know have professional peripherals (some have hotkey stickers on keycaps), vs lots of other creative fields have specialized decks/hardware to make streamline workflow.
Like part of me feels like there is a better physical hardware implmentation to manipulate all the curves/histograms other than moving around with mouse, but mouse+keyboard is... good enough.