[Blend tool in Designer]

@2ddpainter@EricP i did not come across Cavalry so far. Prob better than C4D since it'll retain path fills & strokes etc - but I guess it's still a workaround, having the toolset in your main app and not requiring to single out individual parts of your designs + transfer/cp them around is paramount for a seamless creation process. But it does look great for other applications, thanks a lot for the hint!

[Blend tool in Designer]

I'd like to add my +1 & agree with other commenters

Honestly Adobe has destroyed the UX of PS over the last years, and it starts to feel like Illustrator is slowly following suite. After 21 years, I've come down to actively looking for any alternative that checks the core feature set I need, feels good to work with, and isn't OS-locked.

2.0 checks most of those boxes and gets quite a few things down even better than the industry standard - but with functionality like the blend tool nowhere in sight, it makes it impossible for me to fully switch. Otherwise It'd be a no-brainer. Affinity's price point is remarkably accessible and a tremendous deal for hobbyists, but it's peanuts for business/professionals. I'm sitting here, cash in hand, happy to pay you twice or thrice the current asking price, not once but yearly. More than worth it.

But if the software is missing some core vector manipulation features that are essential for my workflow, I sadly can't, as much as I would very very much love to. (And I know, "essential" is still subjective for things like the blend tool, but in the end I want to get away from Apps that require me to compromise on my workflow, not to trade them for other compromises)

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Some added constructive input, since the updates sound like this feature might very well still be mid development:

The blend tool in Illustrator is actually pretty basic, when it comes down to its full functionality. The new radial tool is an improvement over plain manual rotate-duplicate workflow, but also rather limited. Both are important functions though, but Ai also just provides a limited, bare minimum in the end.

What I would've loved to see for more than a decade, is a vector editing software that approaches parametric path instancing & manipulation in a similar way to how the MoGraph Cloner works in Cinema4D. A multifunctional node that lets you define step-instancing between 2 or more objects, control their distribution, alignment, per-step-transformations, and provides a toolset of stackable modifiers that enable further transforms of the instances with simple logic, noise maps, and even simple scripts.

I sometimes actually end up bouncing my vectors, doing all the parametric/blending stuff in C4D, and re-exporting those splines to Illustrator (as good as possible at least). It's a sucky & non-streamlined workflow, but the C4D Cloner is so powerful that sometimes it's worth the effort, or even the only solution aside manual construction.

If such an approach would be feasible and achievable, I might actually forget other vector editing tools even exist