wonderings

I think you would need to spend much more time with both to really see the differences and what each is better and worse at. That being said, Adobe has going for it that it is the standard. You have seen this yourself, your client wants .AI files because they are used everywhere and are the standard for vector work. This is not going to change anytime soon and if you are working or collaborating with other people you may find you need an Adobe subscription in order to properly work with them.

Not sure why you would not want your tracing function to be in Designer. If you are tracing an image you are wanting to make a vector out of it, why not cut out the step of tracing in one app only then to bring into another. To me this is just extra steps, and while I think Illustrator still is not great with tracing, especially compared to Corel, I would not want to have a utility app with Adobe to trace my image, make it a vector and then require me to bring it into illustrator to finishing doing what I need to do with this traced image.

Yes, but because someone has moved to different software it does not mean you will always be able to accomplish what you could do before. So sometimes you need to hold on to the software that worked and got the job done before, despite wanting to move away. Looks like in this case though a solution was found that matched the duotone done in Photoshop which is great and allows the OP to continue on and not need to add an Adobe subscription for one particular task.

Then I would agree with the client, the duo tone done in Photoshop is nicer. I made the duo tone in photoshop in my above post and took the file made in Affinity Photos from Smadells post to compare. I would say with the client being picky your best option is to get a license for Photoshop, or at least do a demo of Photoshop to make the file you need. Also if you wanted to send the full file I could make the duotone for you with your RGB values and send back a PSD file

comparing your file to a duo tone made in Photoshop with the OP's RGB values does look significantly different. While yours on sight looks better to me, who knows what the client is after in terms of look and feel. Attached is a screen shot comparing the 2.

It might be worth keeping an Adobe CC license, this would allow 2 users to use it (technically the license is only for one person, but 2 different people can use it at once). This gives you the ability to get your work done as you always have till you figure out alternative ways of doing it Affinity. I would say long term plan would be to get rid of Adobe once you are 100% happy with Affinity and can do everything you need to do with the Affinity software.

Is this something you do a lot? If so it might be worth looking around to see if you can find a CS6 perpetual license version of Adobe... or maybe you have it if you have been in business for a while? Creating a duotone in photoshop is super easy and this is literally a 2 min job of setting up. Not something I use often but it is needed every now and then for specific print jobs. duo.psd

Adobe stock brings your plan up a fair bit. We have Adobe stock with our CC licenses. It is unlimited and having a massive library for images and vectors at my finger tips is super helpful and makes life a lot easier. I would have to sit down though and really work out if it is worth the higher price tag, on quick thought I would if you were able to factor in the time it saves hunting for artwork and designing when you have access to just about anything and everything you could need.

No answers but why are you trying to mix CMYK and RGB? If the intent is for final output in print then I would say do everything in CMYK as your RGB is going to have to be converted anyways and better to work with the colour family that will be printing it. And if not printing why not use RGB completely as it does have a wider gamut?

Financial punishment? You are not owed anything for being multi platform. You would have noticed I am sure that when you purchased your Affinity software that you had to specify if it was for Mac or PC. While not the most common practice these days, it still happens. CorelDraw is an example, you buy a Windows or Mac version. When Adobe went to the cloud they became cross platform as it was a subscription model you were paying monthly, no reason to need 2 subscriptions. Before that you needed to buy for the OS you were using. Of course it would be nice to have one purchase and be able to use across multi OS's. I do wonder if it would be an issue though with the ways you can buy their software. How would cross OS work if you bought Serif on the Apple App Store or Windows Store? Would they have to sell those cheaper because those are locked to their specific OS? As you did say the software is not expensive, it is a great value for the dollar with very feature rich software.

Sounds like you want something like Canva. These apps are for people to design and layout their work. It is not made to be a template based app where you just chose the look like you like and enter your info. www.canva.com sounds like it is more up your ally. Not sure what kind of work you do, but relying on free templates that anyone can use is probably not the best way to display a company to the world.

As Dan mentioned updates are free for V1 and there is no V2 released so all you need is to get an update done. You will find people here happy to help, so deep breaths and know that you don't need to spend a penny more for the software, just get the updates figured out. If you can answer a few questions I am sure you will have help to guide you through getting the updates installed. Are you on a Mac or PC? How did you buy Affinity Publisher? Direct through the Serif Affinity website or did you purchase it through an App store on your computer (Windows store on Windows or App store on Mac)?

If you google "Affinity Publisher templates" you will find there are a wide variety of templates. Not sure what you need specifically, but generally reports and forms are easy to setup and copy a look you like from scratch

As nice as the idea sounds, it also brings back headaches that Adobe has basically fixed becoming the standard and getting the majority of people on Adobe CC which means everyone is using the same version which makes collaboration so easy. This used to be a massive headache, people on various versions, or using different software before Adobe was completely at the top. You had Adobe, Quark, Corel, all ingrained deeply into different businesses. Now Adobe dominates and a big positive because of this is we all use the same software now. Over turning that and getting more people onto something else will create big headaches and would take years and years for a new standard to emerge if one was ever to replace Adobe as the standard.

I just tried a word document using the place feature in Publisher. It held on to the formatting for the text in one document that had no images. In another I tried that had a single picture the picture did not import at all. Not sure if I am missing something for how to import a Word document in Publisher but I get zero options when using "place" and selecting my word document. To compare to Indesign I get this when importing a Word document. I would not say Indesign is great at holding onto the formatting in Word, which is fine for me as I like to set things properly rather then try and use Word's quirkiness.