tomgreen

Possibly the best option yes. My background is in Graphic Design and Illustration, 20+ years, so I'm more used to creative software than CAD programmes. My artworks are also output as prints, posters etc so I still need the graphic capabilities. For now I'll stick to my other software and maybe come back to Affinity if they improve the boolean tools and add a shape builder. I've used AD since the beta programme and was very hopeful at first but sadly in all these years it's not been possible to complete an entire project with it.

I wish we would just be given some basic answers by the serif team. I think after 8 years of waiting for basic but necessary tool functions in Designer, we deserve some respect and some updates.

I was also looking for the shape builder function in the app and confused when couldn't find it since I remember reading a tweet about this by Serif 4 years ago. (dudes, when you promise something please take a look at your Twitter, at least delete it ) However it seems like one of the marketing team promises that engineering team could never really cared/figured. 
 
To the people who defends the lack of the feature, it's just unbelievable. Shape builder does not just add shapes. It adds, divides, deletes, closed shapes or just intersecting lines without the need of excessive copies of the same shape. It's the most used command when building geometrical work. I just select the area, press alt+m, quickly clearing out the guidelines and create the geometry in just 15 seconds, done. 
 
While doing a professional job, time matters most. If a time saving feature like this is overlooked for years, then the software is just not well suited for professional work. 
 
I really really hate Adobe and I bought all of your apps the day they released for iPad. Moved out from Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop *almost*. I just want to ditch all of the Adobe software from my process but still there's a gap. 
 
Please give us a clear answer about when or if this feature and the image tracking is coming to affinity! 
 
Edit : Found the tweet: https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/918024995900665856?s=19

The attached image shows a simplified version of what I am trying to achieve. I believe this should be a very simple thing to do but after spending over 2 hours with affinity designer I am now at a complete loss.
My aim is simple, to keep the diagonal lines between the 2 curves and delete the excess, the result would be the lines in green. The shape on the right is the result of the divide option, this is not what I expected at all. It is not good enough to simply hide or mask the lines, (which is how I created the green shapes), as the file is to be sent to a laser engraver, this also means shapes cannot be expanded.
As I mentioned this is a simplified version of what I want to achieve and so it is not suitable to select individual nodes on the diagonal lines and drag them to the curves as there will be hundreds of them, it is also not suitable to add nodes where the lines overlap the curves and then delete the unwanted nodes.
In illustrator this would have taken seconds, select all, divide, and then delete unwanted nodes. Alternatively the diagonal lines could be converted to a compound shape and the circle used to delete unwanted areas using boolean operations. The boolean operations in AD do not work in any way that I would expect.
I have been using graphics software for over 20 years, in all that time I have never found anything as unintuitive as AD. I have been patient and tried and tried but in 4 years of ownership I have not been able to complete a single project with this software. There is no shape builder tool, no knife tool and no vector eraser, so many basic things are missing, many of which have been requested since 2014.
If anyone could enlighten me as to how this most basic of functions can be achieved I would be very grateful.

Thank you all for your time and input, from what I have read it seems that it is impossible to efficiently achieve the result I wanted with Affinity Designer. As I said in my original post, this was a  vastly simplified version of what I needed to do and it simply is not feasible to be deleting thousands of paths or points individually.
As I also said in my original post,  @Pšenda, Expanding Strokes and Clipping Masks are not an option as the file is to be sent to a laser machine, you only have to switch to outline mode to see what the laser will see and realise how this does not work.
Sadly it seems that after 4 years Affinity Designer remains unusable for my purposes.