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I find Affinity really good for this kind of thing, as anything can be a mask (see screen grab example) go if you make a mask group (or multi mask as I call em) you can add multiple layers of whatever you want that add to the mask
Screen Grab 2023-06-24 at 11.55.12 am.mov

Interesting Textures and really useful technique....like it!
There is also the new option of dragging seamless patterns from the assets panel onto the fill swatch. Where you can apply scaling then recolour | Transparency + Layer adjustments. Applying Masking after this would be interesting but have not played around with it!

Wish granted.. beginning of last year January 2020.  
Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.

I find Affinity Designer to be more streamlined. I see that VS has a bunch of tools under the magnet for editing skew, perspective etc and they are all their own tool where as Affinity Designer has these as context tool bar options under a single tool, the node tool. Also there are many tools for gradients in VS where as in Affinity this is handled by the Appearance panel which allows the application of multiple strokes and fills with blend options which can act like the free form gradient tool in Illustrator. I find Designer more intuitive due to not having bloated the interface. Rather than tools there are additional contextually relevant options under fewer tools. Designer is missing a lot less than many think because it just does it differently. That said while I can work-a-round shape builder with the expand stroke, contour, and Boolean geometry a shape builder that condenses the steps would be nice. Couple other tools would be vector brushes, warp and autotrace/selection to curve. The blend tool and many of the path effect tools in VS and Inkscape have I think shouldn't be separate tools but would be handled within a vector brush; again simplify, less tool bar bloat.

I find Affinity Designer to be more streamlined. I see that VS has a bunch of tools under the magnet for editing skew, perspective etc and they are all their own tool where as Affinity Designer has these as context tool bar options under a single tool, the node tool. Also there are many tools for gradients in VS where as in Affinity this is handled by the Appearance panel which allows the application of multiple strokes and fills with blend options which can act like the free form gradient tool in Illustrator. I find Designer more intuitive due to not having bloated the interface. Rather than tools there are additional contextually relevant options under fewer tools. Designer is missing a lot less than many think because it just does it differently. That said while I can work-a-round shape builder with the expand stroke, contour, and Boolean geometry a shape builder that condenses the steps would be nice. Couple other tools would be vector brushes, warp and autotrace/selection to curve. The blend tool and many of the path effect tools in VS and Inkscape have I think shouldn't be separate tools but would be handled within a vector brush; again simplify, less tool bar bloat.

I find Affinity Designer to be more streamlined. I see that VS has a bunch of tools under the magnet for editing skew, perspective etc and they are all their own tool where as Affinity Designer has these as context tool bar options under a single tool, the node tool. Also there are many tools for gradients in VS where as in Affinity this is handled by the Appearance panel which allows the application of multiple strokes and fills with blend options which can act like the free form gradient tool in Illustrator. I find Designer more intuitive due to not having bloated the interface. Rather than tools there are additional contextually relevant options under fewer tools. Designer is missing a lot less than many think because it just does it differently. That said while I can work-a-round shape builder with the expand stroke, contour, and Boolean geometry a shape builder that condenses the steps would be nice. Couple other tools would be vector brushes, warp and autotrace/selection to curve. The blend tool and many of the path effect tools in VS and Inkscape have I think shouldn't be separate tools but would be handled within a vector brush; again simplify, less tool bar bloat.

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.  I miss spoke it's actually more flexible than AI's freeform gradient as you can modify more options such as the shape of the gradient around the point, the size and area of coverage, the way it blends, add additional colors at various points with their own opacity levels, etc.  There is a lot more control.
As far as the others we definitely do need a Shape Builder tool.  I have searched and fiddled around with the boolean geometry xor and node tools join and close curve buttons to varying degrees of success but this only works with simple shapes having no real line overlap.  There is also a great need for a vector deform tool like Adobe Illustrators Envelope Distort Mesh Warp and to Warp to Shape tools as well as a Live Trace tool.  A curve smoothing and simplification tool to cut down on the number of nodes would also be nice.  As far as 3D text this can be somewhat achieved with the fx 3d and bevel tools.  

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.  I miss spoke it's actually more flexible than AI's freeform gradient as you can modify more options such as the shape of the gradient around the point, the size and area of coverage, the way it blends, add additional colors at various points with their own opacity levels, etc.  There is a lot more control.
As far as the others we definitely do need a Shape Builder tool.  I have searched and fiddled around with the boolean geometry xor and node tools join and close curve buttons to varying degrees of success but this only works with simple shapes having no real line overlap.  There is also a great need for a vector deform tool like Adobe Illustrators Envelope Distort Mesh Warp and to Warp to Shape tools as well as a Live Trace tool.  A curve smoothing and simplification tool to cut down on the number of nodes would also be nice.  As far as 3D text this can be somewhat achieved with the fx 3d and bevel tools.  

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.  I miss spoke it's actually more flexible than AI's freeform gradient as you can modify more options such as the shape of the gradient around the point, the size and area of coverage, the way it blends, add additional colors at various points with their own opacity levels, etc.  There is a lot more control.
As far as the others we definitely do need a Shape Builder tool.  I have searched and fiddled around with the boolean geometry xor and node tools join and close curve buttons to varying degrees of success but this only works with simple shapes having no real line overlap.  There is also a great need for a vector deform tool like Adobe Illustrators Envelope Distort Mesh Warp and to Warp to Shape tools as well as a Live Trace tool.  A curve smoothing and simplification tool to cut down on the number of nodes would also be nice.  As far as 3D text this can be somewhat achieved with the fx 3d and bevel tools.  

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.  I miss spoke it's actually more flexible than AI's freeform gradient as you can modify more options such as the shape of the gradient around the point, the size and area of coverage, the way it blends, add additional colors at various points with their own opacity levels, etc.  There is a lot more control.
As far as the others we definitely do need a Shape Builder tool.  I have searched and fiddled around with the boolean geometry xor and node tools join and close curve buttons to varying degrees of success but this only works with simple shapes having no real line overlap.  There is also a great need for a vector deform tool like Adobe Illustrators Envelope Distort Mesh Warp and to Warp to Shape tools as well as a Live Trace tool.  A curve smoothing and simplification tool to cut down on the number of nodes would also be nice.  As far as 3D text this can be somewhat achieved with the fx 3d and bevel tools.  

Actually Affinity Designer does have free form gradient.  It was added at the beginning of 2020 to Affinity Designer with the new Appearances tab which allows you to add multiple fills and strokes to a layer.  If you add a gradient either circle or ellipse to the fill and then set the right sides opacity to 0% so its completely transparent and the left side to the desired colour and set the blend mode to average (or you can play around with it) it will become a free form gradient point and function just like free form gradient in Adobe Illustrator.  Duplicate the fills and adjust the color on the left and you will have multiple gradient points that will interact with one another.  Use the handles on the gradient to stretch and shrink the area of coverage of the gradient and how much it overlaps with the gradient fill point next to it.

I have created gradient maps and saved them as presets however it does not appear that there is a way to export or import these settings.  For LUTs there is a cog icon when you select the LUTs in the adjustments dialogue which allows you to import and export LUTs but there is no such icon when you open the gradient map.  It would be nice to be able to import gradients into the map or allow one to select a gradient from the swatches and then apply it to the gradient map adjustment. 

I have created gradient maps and saved them as presets however it does not appear that there is a way to export or import these settings.  For LUTs there is a cog icon when you select the LUTs in the adjustments dialogue which allows you to import and export LUTs but there is no such icon when you open the gradient map.  It would be nice to be able to import gradients into the map or allow one to select a gradient from the swatches and then apply it to the gradient map adjustment.