I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.