Yeah I totally agree, I love Photoshop UX colors and general function. It's been a while though.

On the other hand GIMP has a HUD command palette with hotkey / and you can search for all image functions which is fine with me as I use my keeb a lot.

And I did import PS hotkeys to go with my many years of memory and it helped me feel at home much better.

I have used many image editors over the years and I can at least say for basic functions, cropping, scaling, art it opens fast compared to wine and the pre 3.x UI is so much nicer to use.

I would definitely not recommend a cold switch for anyone at a job, the transition would be frustrating and problematic. But learning the "life raft" as a backup seems sensible.

It was a hard hit to my ego going from a PS God back to a peasant in terms of output, but I'd say the last few years the tooling has improved tremendously and I can say I'm a novice or mid tier photo editor in GIMP.

The text tool is nowhere as robust as PS, I felt like PS was a all in one printer one stop shop. But then there's Inkscape so I am okay with dividing my functions up among a few tools instead of only 1.

I've designed concepts for houses in GIMP as weird as that may seem.

God do I hate 2.8 and 2.10 UX it was soo bad in terms of getting out of my way and an embarrassment at work, 2.99.xx thankfully is light years apart.

Edit: Also the GEGL non destructive fx stuff is really interesting and G'MIC Qt addon filters