Serious question: Has anyone proficient in Photoshop given GIMP a proper go and come out the other side wanting to use it?
The problem with GIMP in industry is 1) that .psd is a standard, and 2) that Photoshop has a bad UI that takes a lot of work to understand well enough to do the very fine work most people are doing with it. Nobody would want to start over even if the consensus was that GIMP was better than Photoshop; Photoshop would still be good enough.
Hopefully Adobe will be user-hostile enough to lose a bunch of people to Affinity, and a bunch of people on Affinity will weaken Adobe standards in industry generally. GIMP could sneak in on the back of that.
GIMP is Free Software, it only gains features, never loses them. In the long term, there's no way anyone else can compete.
The article is about losing features due to incompatibility of plugins. Perhaps you refer to some more abstract open source concept?
Now that the API is stable for 3.0, we're hoping more people will feel comfortable updating to it.
Additionally it is trivial to have both installed on the same machine and there haven't been breaking changes in the xcf format as far as I know so you can open the same file on both version without issues.
Photoshop wasn't the photoshop of today but neither was gimp.
but i'm not sure how well that mimics photoshop in day to day stuff. hopefully they make strides in usability because it wasn't there the last time i tried it.