I'll just preface this by saying that Affinity Designer does a lot right π
For me the primary purpose of swatches is so that I can quickly and easily make color (and ideally gradient) tweaks to my whole document. Affinity Designer has some frustrating flaws which makes working on complex files difficult.
You never know whether the color assigned is global or not. Why aren't the small white triangles shown in the swatch palette used throughout the UI to indicate that a color is global?
If you use global colors to create a gradient and save it to your swatch palette the colors in the gradient swatch are no longer the global ones used to create it. Why not? This is a troublesome hidden behaviour.
Global gradients, how is this not a thing?
Thanks for reading :)