My concern with the lack of warp/distort after all these years is that there may be a fundamental weakness in the foundation of the tool that doesn't allow for a nondestructive manipulation of the artwork - that it breaks the image - and to do so will require a ground-up change to the structure of the file. Because lets face it, warp/distort has been a part of just about every other vector app since day one.
I appreciate the Affinity tools, the well-thought-out UX and the power behind the related apps, but my work requires contextual placement of art in a fast time frame. To lose a feature that's been around for over 25 years is hard to understand.