jonatello

Hi, I'm a new (and enthusiastic) user. I made a similar post and was redirected here, and after reading, i feel the discussion is hyperfocusing too much on the idea of "rough/messy vs smooth/perfect" which barely scratches the surface of why forced smoothing can present problems for an illustrator or designer. 
rensa, in the reply above this one, said something much closer to what i was planning on saying in here. Smoothing can impact precision. Maps are a perfect example. There are plenty other examples too. I was trying to draw little tiny rectangles and they were being transformed into round blobs. I suppose i could zoom way in for every tiny jagged or "rough" detail, but it doesn't take a big imagination to picture how tedious and unintuitive that could become when drawing a rather complex image. 
Choosing vector over raster isnt always just an aesthetic choice. You can make ultra smooth bitmap drawings (or paintings) if you want. Its also a scalability issue. You might have a rather detailed and "bumpy" design (such as a map, or a cityscape with lots of little angular bits) that you want to be able to make scalable for various uses. 
Now, i fully accept that it just might not be technically feasible to implement this feature yet, which is fine, but this conversation is about more than "messy vs clean" (altho wanting a more natural representation of an artist's brush strokes and contours within a scalable vector image is also very valid and important) 

Hi, I'm a new (and enthusiastic) user. I made a similar post and was redirected here, and after reading, i feel the discussion is hyperfocusing too much on the idea of "rough/messy vs smooth/perfect" which barely scratches the surface of why forced smoothing can present problems for an illustrator or designer. 
rensa, in the reply above this one, said something much closer to what i was planning on saying in here. Smoothing can impact precision. Maps are a perfect example. There are plenty other examples too. I was trying to draw little tiny rectangles and they were being transformed into round blobs. I suppose i could zoom way in for every tiny jagged or "rough" detail, but it doesn't take a big imagination to picture how tedious and unintuitive that could become when drawing a rather complex image. 
Choosing vector over raster isnt always just an aesthetic choice. You can make ultra smooth bitmap drawings (or paintings) if you want. Its also a scalability issue. You might have a rather detailed and "bumpy" design (such as a map, or a cityscape with lots of little angular bits) that you want to be able to make scalable for various uses. 
Now, i fully accept that it just might not be technically feasible to implement this feature yet, which is fine, but this conversation is about more than "messy vs clean" (altho wanting a more natural representation of an artist's brush strokes and contours within a scalable vector image is also very valid and important) 

Hi, I'm a new (and enthusiastic) user. I made a similar post and was redirected here, and after reading, i feel the discussion is hyperfocusing too much on the idea of "rough/messy vs smooth/perfect" which barely scratches the surface of why forced smoothing can present problems for an illustrator or designer. 
rensa, in the reply above this one, said something much closer to what i was planning on saying in here. Smoothing can impact precision. Maps are a perfect example. There are plenty other examples too. I was trying to draw little tiny rectangles and they were being transformed into round blobs. I suppose i could zoom way in for every tiny jagged or "rough" detail, but it doesn't take a big imagination to picture how tedious and unintuitive that could become when drawing a rather complex image. 
Choosing vector over raster isnt always just an aesthetic choice. You can make ultra smooth bitmap drawings (or paintings) if you want. Its also a scalability issue. You might have a rather detailed and "bumpy" design (such as a map, or a cityscape with lots of little angular bits) that you want to be able to make scalable for various uses. 
Now, i fully accept that it just might not be technically feasible to implement this feature yet, which is fine, but this conversation is about more than "messy vs clean" (altho wanting a more natural representation of an artist's brush strokes and contours within a scalable vector image is also very valid and important) 

Personal preferences is one thing. Industry standard is another. One should think (hope) that standards are based on general good practice, common sense and practical logic.
I expect from professional apps to have FULL control over what I’m doing. I guess it”s fine if a tool is trying to help people draw even lines if their hands are too shaky – but this is function should be optional.
It’s like autocorrect while typing. You can turn it off in settings. However helpful it might be - people would be pretty pissed if they couldn’t turn it off.
it's the case of computer trying to think too much for the user. 

I can see that this topic has been litigated to death already, but I was hoping to add my perspective.
I've just picked up Affinity Designer because it's a great Illustrator replacement for my work use cases—namely, finishing scientific plots and building posters and graphics. But I've also started getting into  fantasy map making with my Surface, and I'd love to be able to draw coastlines in Affinity Designer Unfortunately, the smoothing on the vector pencil tool makes it very difficult to draw coastlines that look believable; they just smooth out way too much. The raster paintbrush is much better, but I'd love to be able to retain the vertices. I could zoom in to do detail work, but it wouldn't be the same; it's much slower and requires a much more deliberate process (I prefer to just let my hand wander a bit after roughing out the continents).
I love Affinity either way, but the option to turn the smoothing down further (closer to what Inkscape and Illustrator allow) would be very appreciated!