Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice, but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another colour space and colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible, too. Except for Illustrator.¹
The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free (both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™.
TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas.
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¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.