Bryan Rieger

Good read.  The TLDR version is the following (from the article):
I would add not only a consistent rule throughout your product, but also one that is in-line with platform (macOS, iPadOS, Windows) guidelines and user expectations. Traditionally the web hasn't had this problem, but as more and more web apps are now also desktop apps, the platform specific guidelines begin to come into play again.

Oh, I so miss having a story editor in Publisher. I keep holding back moving content from .rtf/.docx into Publisher until it's absolutely necessary (which causes other issues) so that I can continue to edit content in a sane manner (and have access to proofing tools such as Antidote[1]). It may seem like a small thing, but when you have dozens, or hundreds of flowing text pages, being able to just focus on the text (with tools designed to manipulate text) is such a godsend.
Also, being able to link text documents (in .rtf/.docx) and be able to update them via the Resource Manager would be a fantastic addition, and somewhat reduce the need for a built-in story editor (although it would still be nice to have one).
[1] InDesign and Illustrator both have Antidote support available. It would be massively helpful to many English and French users around the world if Antidote integration were possible within the Affinity apps.

I think this thread perfectly illustrates how one person's bug is another person's feature. Personally, I cringe every time I have to use the text wrap alpha feature in Publisher as I always end up having to go and delete 99% of the nodes and then redraw the shape (incl. curves) with a more reasonable node count which then allows me to tweak the shape to get the wrapping to work better. I'm always amazed at @loukash's ability to find endless (and ingenious) workarounds in the Affinity suite.
Hopefully we see improvements to both auto-trace tool and node/geometry clean-up tools in the not-too-distant future. 🤞

As there is no sign of a text editor for editing long form text linked boxes, hopefully scripting support will be added soon so we can develop our own.
Indesign had a story editor, heck even Scribus has a story editor, but Publisher, nope!

I think one of the problems here is how each of us interprets 'scripting' today.
In the early days of InDesign, and when Quark ruled the DTP world, scripting was usually thought of in relation to automation; enabling a script to complete a series of mundane, repetitive tasks that enabled users to focus on more high-value work. In the years since, the concept of 'scripting' has morphed considerably. While we still create scripts to automate repetitive tasks, we now also create scripts to create new tools, workflow and functionality that extend our existing tools, enabling us to perform complex tasks that would have taken hours or days, in seconds and minutes. Going beyond simply creating new tools and functionality (Cinema 4D, Illustrator, etc), scripts can also be utilized to create entirely new generative works (Processing Blender, Rhino, etc).
From here it's not a huge leap to see AI as the evolution of scripting. We use it today to perform tedious, repetitive tasks, (object selection, masking, etc) and to create new tools (for writing, style transfer, content-aware fill, etc) as well as to create entirely new works (Firefly, etc). Even the way we create 'scripts' is changing. While we still write scripts in various languages, we also now have tools such as Apple's Shortcuts which employ a Scratch 'block-like' interface, or tools such as Unity, Unreal, etc which also provide visual node-based/flow-control scripting tools.
I think that while focusing on matching existing scripting support from other workflows is helpful in the short-term, it could quickly lead to a situation where user expectations have moved far beyond what was considered state-of-the-art just a few years ago, and risk leaving the Affinity suite feeling further dated, and increasingly irrelevant.
In the wise words of a fellow Canadian “…skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

Unfortunately expectations for a UI/UX prototyping tool have changed considerably in recent years. The collaborative workflows enabled by Figma have become essential for many orgs, but even they are struggling to add meaningful prototyping capabilities to their app. Recently Figma added a very simple implementation of variable states, which while helpful, is still a long way off from what folks are expecting these days. One of the big problems is all of these tools (except Framer, which only focuses on the web) have abstracted away all of the underlying platform components, patterns, and best practices (iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Windows, etc). Instead what we're still left with is 'pictures under glass', which unfortunately still translates to stitching many different static screen compositions together with click/tap events.
It might be seem trivial to add 'click-through' prototype capabilities for the Affinity apps, but without a solid foundation (based on reactive views, layouts, components, states, etc) you hit the wall pretty quickly, with users wanting more and more features, that require further significant changes in architecture and approaches. Even Sketch is still pretty much stuck with simple click-through prototypes after all these years.
I believe the opportunity for Affinity to compete with UI/UX prototyping has unfortunately passed, and any further investment in that area would be a distraction IMHO.
Just my opinion as someone who was involved in building (and supporting) numerous UX/UI prototyping tools for the past two+ decades.
Personally, I think Serif has done an amazing job with Affinity in offering creatives a competitive toolset with different priorities and a refreshingly simple business model. There's still lots of opportunity to not only evolve and improve the existing products, but to do it in a way that continues to separate them from the competition. I'd love for the narrative to change from “Affinity needs to catch-up”, to ”ooh, that's a really wonderful way of working”. Different is good. 

I think one of the problems here is how each of us interprets 'scripting' today.
In the early days of InDesign, and when Quark ruled the DTP world, scripting was usually thought of in relation to automation; enabling a script to complete a series of mundane, repetitive tasks that enabled users to focus on more high-value work. In the years since, the concept of 'scripting' has morphed considerably. While we still create scripts to automate repetitive tasks, we now also create scripts to create new tools, workflow and functionality that extend our existing tools, enabling us to perform complex tasks that would have taken hours or days, in seconds and minutes. Going beyond simply creating new tools and functionality (Cinema 4D, Illustrator, etc), scripts can also be utilized to create entirely new generative works (Processing Blender, Rhino, etc).
From here it's not a huge leap to see AI as the evolution of scripting. We use it today to perform tedious, repetitive tasks, (object selection, masking, etc) and to create new tools (for writing, style transfer, content-aware fill, etc) as well as to create entirely new works (Firefly, etc). Even the way we create 'scripts' is changing. While we still write scripts in various languages, we also now have tools such as Apple's Shortcuts which employ a Scratch 'block-like' interface, or tools such as Unity, Unreal, etc which also provide visual node-based/flow-control scripting tools.
I think that while focusing on matching existing scripting support from other workflows is helpful in the short-term, it could quickly lead to a situation where user expectations have moved far beyond what was considered state-of-the-art just a few years ago, and risk leaving the Affinity suite feeling further dated, and increasingly irrelevant.
In the wise words of a fellow Canadian “…skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

I think this thread perfectly illustrates how one person's bug is another person's feature. Personally, I cringe every time I have to use the text wrap alpha feature in Publisher as I always end up having to go and delete 99% of the nodes and then redraw the shape (incl. curves) with a more reasonable node count which then allows me to tweak the shape to get the wrapping to work better. I'm always amazed at @loukash's ability to find endless (and ingenious) workarounds in the Affinity suite.
Hopefully we see improvements to both auto-trace tool and node/geometry clean-up tools in the not-too-distant future. 🤞

@R C-R absolutely. I think that’s why it’s important to allow people to choose whether they use any AI at all (many will want nothing to do with it), and if they do choose to, allowing them to decide which AIs they are comfortable with (ethically, personally, features, etc), and which ones they are not.
If AI is baked directly into the product that personal choice is essentially removed from the user, then making the decision about whether or not to use the product at all, a dilemma we’ve already witnessed with a number of Adobe users in recent months.

Excellent! This worked perfectly.

Or have the colour pixel radius automatically adapt depending on the zoom level. If you’re zoomed in and your cursor is over a single pixel, use a single pixel as the colour picker radius. Having to constantly change tool settings gets old quickly.

What's particularly sad about this is Serif just completely redesigned the UI for v2, but chose to disregard many basic UI/UX fundamentals along with modern usability recommendations. I'm not sure having Serif go back and redesign it again will magically fix all of the issues. Hopefully, Serif are paying attention (not just here, but also in various communities across the web, Reddit, etc) and will honestly begin to work to resolve these issues in the coming v2 updates.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to fork out again for v3 if these issues aren't addressed. 

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"
In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.
[1] I primarily use Procreate for my illustration work these days (I was a UI/UX designer for 25+ years, and ran a tiny, but well known product design studio with my partner). I have a love/hate relationship with Affinity. I LOVE the combination of vector and bitmap drawing in one application (ah, Fireworks RIP), the quality of the brushes, and the overall performance, but I struggle daily with the UI/UX, as well as the countless bugs, weird design choices, and frequent crashes (hello v2.x). I feel like I've developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome while using Affinity products. 
Adobe is (sadly) still my primary driver for "getting sh!t done" and working with others.

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"
In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.
[1] I primarily use Procreate for my illustration work these days (I was a UI/UX designer for 25+ years, and ran a tiny, but well known product design studio with my partner). I have a love/hate relationship with Affinity. I LOVE the combination of vector and bitmap drawing in one application (ah, Fireworks RIP), the quality of the brushes, and the overall performance, but I struggle daily with the UI/UX, as well as the countless bugs, weird design choices, and frequent crashes (hello v2.x). I feel like I've developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome while using Affinity products. 
Adobe is (sadly) still my primary driver for "getting sh!t done" and working with others.

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"
In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.
[1] I primarily use Procreate for my illustration work these days (I was a UI/UX designer for 25+ years, and ran a tiny, but well known product design studio with my partner). I have a love/hate relationship with Affinity. I LOVE the combination of vector and bitmap drawing in one application (ah, Fireworks RIP), the quality of the brushes, and the overall performance, but I struggle daily with the UI/UX, as well as the countless bugs, weird design choices, and frequent crashes (hello v2.x). I feel like I've developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome while using Affinity products. 
Adobe is (sadly) still my primary driver for "getting sh!t done" and working with others.

What's particularly sad about this is Serif just completely redesigned the UI for v2, but chose to disregard many basic UI/UX fundamentals along with modern usability recommendations. I'm not sure having Serif go back and redesign it again will magically fix all of the issues. Hopefully, Serif are paying attention (not just here, but also in various communities across the web, Reddit, etc) and will honestly begin to work to resolve these issues in the coming v2 updates.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to fork out again for v3 if these issues aren't addressed. 

I don't think we're ever going to see it working as seamlessly as it does on device. I could be wrong, but I don't think there's anything app developers need to do to support Universal Clipboard, it just syncs public pasteboards automatically. When an app copies something to the clipboard (pasteboard), it often copies it in multiple formats. For example, it might copy plain text and rich text (formatted text) at the same time so an app that supports only plain text has something it can deal with. A complex app like Affinity needs to be able to copy data that other apps can't support such as text with pinned images that have adjustment layers applied so it copies the complex data to a private pasteboard that only it can access and a "dumbed down" version to the public pasteboard for other apps to use.
I'm no expert but I think that the Universal Clipboard feature syncs only public pasteboard data so even if Affinity had improved pasteboard handling you wouldn't want to copy complex content from one device to another because it would get dumbed down.
I did some tests and I think there is may be one bug and one design limitation that should be reviewed.
Copying text from Affinity on macOS copies text to the public.rtf and two public plain text pasteboards which is great. But while copying text from Affinity on iPadOS copies text to the same public plain text pasteboards, it copies a null value or something like that to the public.rtf pasteboard.
  When I copied a vector shape or raster image from Affinity on macOS it was copied to the com.adobe.pdf pasteboard. This is nicer than the approach that other apps use when dumbing down complex data - many rasterize vectors and copy to public.png or public.tiff. But while this is a better approach on the device, I don't think the com.adobe.pdf pasteboard is synced with Universal Clipboard so there's nothing there for Affinity for iPadOS to paste. Perhaps it would be better if Affinity also copied data to public.tiff or png to provide something that is sync-able. Cheers

While she has extensive experience with the Adobe suite, she hasn't used it in a few years now (everything is Figma). And yes, 'unusable' is possibly an overstatement, but in her context it translates to "there are too many quirks, gotchas, and workarounds that it would negatively impact her work, and the work of others within the company".
I agree with much of what you said, and although critical, I do try to be positive (or at least constructive)—but I do think it's also important to be realistic. For me, for now, Affinity fills a very specific niche, but if (and when) other alternatives become available, I'm not sure there's enough beyond that niche to justify any further investment in Affinity.
[also steps down from soapbox ]

My partner is a (very) senior UX designer at a company that primarily uses Figma, but they do provide employees optional licenses for Procreate and Affinity (Adobe software isn't offered to anybody who isn't in marketing). She was thinking about requesting licenses for Affinity for more visual/sketch work, but she opted to take a look at my copies (macOS and iPadOS) before doing so. I've never heard so many expletives come out of her mouth in 20 minutes, never mind the multiple face palms, and constant muttering of “what, how, why… it's so bad. The basics are completely missing. Was this designed by engineers? How can you use this?[1]"
In the end (about 20 minutes later) she opted to simply go with Procreate and pretty much wrote Affinity off as unusable, which is quite damning from somebody in a design leadership role at a Fortune 500 company.
[1] I primarily use Procreate for my illustration work these days (I was a UI/UX designer for 25+ years, and ran a tiny, but well known product design studio with my partner). I have a love/hate relationship with Affinity. I LOVE the combination of vector and bitmap drawing in one application (ah, Fireworks RIP), the quality of the brushes, and the overall performance, but I struggle daily with the UI/UX, as well as the countless bugs, weird design choices, and frequent crashes (hello v2.x). I feel like I've developed a case of Stockholm Syndrome while using Affinity products. 
Adobe is (sadly) still my primary driver for "getting sh!t done" and working with others.

Thanks everyone for all your suggestions - please keep them coming! They are all useful. 
Initially, we'll be concentrating on exposing existing functionality - primarily, manipulation of documents and their contents. 
Then later we will be able to move on to some of the "new feature" things that have been suggested: custom tools / shapes / brush engines / personas etc. 

Well as PaoloT shortly already indicated, Figma is more of a dynamic collaborative software for creating prototypes in the field of UX and UI design, in contrast to what ADe offers here in a more statically manner. Even you can create UX/UI designs with ADe (...if wanted), it doesn't offer all the UX/UI specific bells & whistles Figma is specialized on and offers here for prototyping. - It's pretty much the same here like creating digital presentation slides with ADe instead of using something more specialized for that tasks/jobs as Keynote or PowerPoint etc. Or creating some architecture- or engineer drawing with ADe instead of using some more specialized CAD software for that purpose.

Sigh, thank you @PaoloT for explaining that in such a sarcastic manner.
She wasn't looking to replace Figma with Designer, just use Designer to sketch out rough ideas, create richer visual design elements, etc. Some people use more than one tool to solve their problems.

What's particularly sad about this is Serif just completely redesigned the UI for v2, but chose to disregard many basic UI/UX fundamentals along with modern usability recommendations. I'm not sure having Serif go back and redesign it again will magically fix all of the issues. Hopefully, Serif are paying attention (not just here, but also in various communities across the web, Reddit, etc) and will honestly begin to work to resolve these issues in the coming v2 updates.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to fork out again for v3 if these issues aren't addressed. 

Or have the colour pixel radius automatically adapt depending on the zoom level. If you’re zoomed in and your cursor is over a single pixel, use a single pixel as the colour picker radius. Having to constantly change tool settings gets old quickly.

This is just a very simple example that I coded now in Cinema 4D. The script is attached to the top object, called "Null". This would be the equivalent of a layer or another object in Affinity. Then, no matter how many objects are set as children of the top object, the script always distributes them evenly between the position of the first and last child. As you all can see in the movie, I can add as many objects I want, and they will always distribute evenly. And it is fully dynamic.
Captura2.mp4