phoerious

Thanks for your reply.
This is more a usability issue than a technical issue. Brush dynamics do work, but only after enabling them manually in the brush's dynamics settings (which are all off by default). Photoshop has at least transfer dynamics enabled by default, which is convenient and shows me as a new user that brush dynamics are working, whereas in Affinity I wasn't so sure about that and had to google it first.
I will test the beta when I find the time. In 1.7 it feels very rough.
It's not horrible, but it doesn't feel smooth either. Perhaps the main issue is that it's too slow, i.e. the zoom factor is too small. It may also be an issue that the zoom factor is constant and not adaptive.
Yeah, this was one of the main pain points.
If you start an entirely new document, there could be an option as to what background to set (transparent, white, black, none). The setting should be remembered. In general, I don't think it makes much sense to start with no layer at all, but perhaps that just comes down to personal preference. In fact, there is already an option to have a "transparent" aka checkerboard background, but that only controls the visual representation in Affinity and doesn't actually create a new layer. I think this is particularly confusing, since for me, a checkerboard implies no background (or a transparent) layer, whereas a white background implies that there is an opaque background layer already.