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Sort of.  Consider that originally Photo did not even save the RAW edits into the .afphoto file but applied them immediately upon leaving Develop mode and if you went back into that mode you would start over.  While they did improve this, Photo permits a range of destructive edits that cannot be represented easily in an xmp file.  Use of an xmp file would be misleading as any changes made using tools which are not easily reflected in such a file would either need to be stored using a custom format that no one else would understand anyway (eliminating the portability benefit you seem to be looking for) or would be missing entirely from the xmp.
 
Even if it did, you would only get an approximation at best of the adjustments that photographer intended.  Different programs apply these values differently.  Just because the XMP files transfer values between them, those values will produce different results in different programs which use different algorithms for similar tools - you would not get the exact look the photographer intended unless that photographer was using the same software you are.  You would still need an exported reference from the photographer to compare against to finish adjusting the values to match, and even with one, you may only get close, as one program may not be able to 100% match the output of another unless you recreate the image pixel by pixel.
If the photographer had already made the appropriate adjustments on the RAW image, he should have exported a high-color-depth, full-resolution version as a TIFF or PNG file and sent you that as a starting point.  As long as he got close to the final results of the RAW development process, any adjustments/changes you would make from there probably would benefit little if at all from restarting the process from the original RAW.
Note also that the original purpose of XMP was not to store RAW adjustments, and the storage of RAW adjustments is mostly in the form of extensions that vary between programs (and thus their interpretation will vary or will be omitted when transferring them between programs).  The original (and portable) purpose of XMP (whether embedded in an image file or present as a sidecar) was to carry custom metadata such as title and author information - not image adjustments, but textual information for cataloging/identification purposes.

Correct.
V1 was a one-time purchase, and you don't need to pay again to continue using V1.
V2 is a one-time purchase, and if you have purchased a V2 license you don't need to pay for that license again to continue using V2.
In other words, this is a perpetual license, not a subscription.

That is unlikely to help - gimp is in the same category of software as Photoshop and Affinity Photo and will have the same workflow issues if you are looking for something else.
Nothing wrong with gimp, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with Affinity Photo, but from what you are describing it is not what you are looking for.
Try RawTherapee or DarkTable instead.  Those are both free/open source and are more likely along the lines of the type of software you are trying to find.
https://www.rawtherapee.com
https://www.darktable.org

Correct.
V1 was a one-time purchase, and you don't need to pay again to continue using V1.
V2 is a one-time purchase, and if you have purchased a V2 license you don't need to pay for that license again to continue using V2.
In other words, this is a perpetual license, not a subscription.

Correct.
V1 was a one-time purchase, and you don't need to pay again to continue using V1.
V2 is a one-time purchase, and if you have purchased a V2 license you don't need to pay for that license again to continue using V2.
In other words, this is a perpetual license, not a subscription.

Some cosmetic issues for a rainy day:
Font Size is off a few pixels in height and width: Font Size, Character Style, and Paragraph Style are 38 px tall (see font size vs. font style in this example) while Font family and Font Style are 40 px tall. Even controls of the same type are different heights. Other lists in this panel are 46 px tall.

Decorations alignment: The Single Underline icon is one pixel lower than the no underline and double underline icons on either side. It is aligned with the three Strikethrough icons.

Positioning and Transform alignment: The Super/Subscript control isn't left/right aligned with the controls above it, and the No Break control isn't left aligned with the controls above it.

 

A dedicated RAW developer / DAM tool / organizer such as Capture One, DxO Optics Pro, or On1 Photo RAW is a good place to start when you are working with your photos.  For culling, initial RAW development, organization and basic image enhancements, they will generally provide a much better workflow than what is possible using a single-image-editor such as Affinity Photo / PhotoShop.
However, you will eventually run into a few images here and there which will require more careful or direct editing than is realistically feasible in those programs.  Then you would use the developer/DAM to do the basic enhancements it does well, and open the resulting image in an actual editor such as Affinity Photo to take care of the finer detail work that programs of this nature excel at.
In spite of some apparent overlap, they are complimentary tools - neither is a particularly suitable replacement for the other.

A dedicated RAW developer / DAM tool / organizer such as Capture One, DxO Optics Pro, or On1 Photo RAW is a good place to start when you are working with your photos.  For culling, initial RAW development, organization and basic image enhancements, they will generally provide a much better workflow than what is possible using a single-image-editor such as Affinity Photo / PhotoShop.
However, you will eventually run into a few images here and there which will require more careful or direct editing than is realistically feasible in those programs.  Then you would use the developer/DAM to do the basic enhancements it does well, and open the resulting image in an actual editor such as Affinity Photo to take care of the finer detail work that programs of this nature excel at.
In spite of some apparent overlap, they are complimentary tools - neither is a particularly suitable replacement for the other.

A dedicated RAW developer / DAM tool / organizer such as Capture One, DxO Optics Pro, or On1 Photo RAW is a good place to start when you are working with your photos.  For culling, initial RAW development, organization and basic image enhancements, they will generally provide a much better workflow than what is possible using a single-image-editor such as Affinity Photo / PhotoShop.
However, you will eventually run into a few images here and there which will require more careful or direct editing than is realistically feasible in those programs.  Then you would use the developer/DAM to do the basic enhancements it does well, and open the resulting image in an actual editor such as Affinity Photo to take care of the finer detail work that programs of this nature excel at.
In spite of some apparent overlap, they are complimentary tools - neither is a particularly suitable replacement for the other.

This has come up before.  There should really be a command to convert an embedded document directly into a group.

This is highly debatable: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30682/are-there-any-recent-studies-of-the-keyboard-vs-mouse-issue
 
People feel like they are working faster when using keyboard shortcuts, but in a great many situations, if objectively measured using an actual clock, using the mouse actually turns out to be faster in practice.  There have been studies in the past which prove this out.  Note that I am not saying it is true across the board - there will obviously be exceptions - but it is definitely true more often than most people realize.

Surprisingly, the Symbols panel and its elements are accessible via System Events, so they can be addressed directly. You can check that out using the Accessibility Inspector via Xcode; each button even has an AXidentifier. I've already made a few such experimental scripts before, see e.g.
Haha. I see it exactly the other way around, by full 180°.  
But to each their own as they say…

They should really take a cue from QuarkXPress on this one.
You can, for example, set up an object style with a horizontal position and width so that applying it to a text frame places that frame in a specific column or within a margin, while at the same time setting its line style and the like...
 
 

Sorry for the late reply. That has helped me. The pen pressure works now.
Thanks

True unless you create the frames in advance and drop them into the existing frames.
 
When using the Move tool ("V" shortcut), enable Lock Children on the context toolbar.

Why would you insert bookmarks in Acrobat? I have tons of bookmarks in my books, some generated by the TOC and some I added manually. I completely agree that the Anchors panel needs to be fixed and improved - the order isn't helpful, you can't change the order, it is always snapping to the top so I lose my place, it expands all nested bookmarks every time I do anything, etc. - but it does actually work and it generates correct bookmarks.
Here's a suggestion to avoid the Anchors panel as much as possible - if you don't have a TOC because it's not that type of publication, add a TOC anyway - make the TOC page a separate section at the end of the document that is excluded on printing and export and select Include headings before TOC in the TOC panel. Use heading text styles in the document and when you generate the TOC it will generate nested anchors that will export as PDF bookmarks in the right order. If you need to bookmark something for which there is no heading, just add a heading on a hidden layer. Doing this will eliminate having to use the Anchors panel.

Welcome to the forums!
Can't speak for Serif, but consider that this would be one more thing on top of what they are doing already and probably would have a negative effect on their ability to continue to develop the products they already have on the market, so it probably can't be justified given that there is a lot more competition in that space and users are already complaining left and right about features that are missing in the products Serif has released already.  Serif is a small company and their developers are already spread thin with the products they are currently maintaining.

Welcome to the forums!
Can't speak for Serif, but consider that this would be one more thing on top of what they are doing already and probably would have a negative effect on their ability to continue to develop the products they already have on the market, so it probably can't be justified given that there is a lot more competition in that space and users are already complaining left and right about features that are missing in the products Serif has released already.  Serif is a small company and their developers are already spread thin with the products they are currently maintaining.

In the interim, you can apply the one you want to happen first, then group the layer, and apply the next FX to the group.

Most English books I've seen have horizontally oriented text that has been rotated 90 degrees.
If all you are trying to do is stack the letters on top of each other for effect that is a much simpler thing to achieve than general purpose vertical writing: just use an unrotated text frame, set the horizontal alignment to centered, and press return (enter on Windows) after each letter of the text you are trying to put there.
For something like a book title on a spine that should not be a big deal?
 
Note that I am not saying that the feature request is in any way unimportant or invalid, but simply that it is not essential for this particular effect on something like a book spline which is a one-off sort of activity in the grand scheme of putting a book together.  Try writing entire stories that way and it would get old fast.
 
This is highly unlikely.  Supporting vertical or even right-to-left text is a massive amount of work - much more than even many developers are likely to realize - and Serif has given no indication that they are actively working on this.  While I would not put it past them to add this feature eventually, I would be quite surprised to see it happen that quickly, and if it did, I would be even more surprised if it actually worked correctly.

Those are for imported files, not for the newly created/modified document content.  In the case of RAW files you have the option of linking to the existing RAW file, for example, instead of copying (embedding) the RAW data into the Affinity Photo file.  This helps to reduce consumed disk space by not storing an extra copy of the data, but also means that there is a dependency on the existing, external file to be present in order to make use of the document (afphoto file).
 
That is going to happen anyway; even if Affinity Photo did save your RAW development steps in an XMP it would not be usable in anything else anyway since nothing else would reproduce the same processing that Photo would have done on the original RAW data.  About the only thing you could really trust to be usable would be metadata (author/copyright info, etc.).
 
This is already possible as long as you use a RAW layer instead of a pixel layer when developing.  The crop tool in the Develop persona can be reselected to regain access to the previously cropped data.  If you use the crop tool in the Photo persona after developing, you need to check the Reveal checkbox on the context toolbar to see the hidden parts of the image which were previously cropped out.
 
There is a split view available from the main toolbar in the Develop persona which compares the current image with the image as it was when you entered the persona.
 
An Affinity Photo document is not a RAW file.  It is more like a Photoshop document.
When you open a RAW file it lands you in the Develop persona to develop the RAW data, and the "Output" setting on the context toolbar defaults to a pixel layer.  If you leave it that way, when you develop the image and return to the Photo persona, the RAW data is thrown away at that point and you are left with a non-RAW image ready to be further modified.  If you change it to a RAW Layer instead, then the RAW data is retained and the layer containing the RAW image is a RAW layer, which is indicated if you hover the mouse over the left edge of that layer in the Layers panel (where most other layer types have an icon to indicate what type they are, for some reason the RAW layers seem to have a blank icon right now, at least on mine).  As long as you leave it as a RAW layer, you can go back to the Develop persona to further adjust it, but most of the editing tools in the Photo persona will not work on that layer without first converting it to a pixel layer, at which point it loses the RAW data and the edits become destructive.  (You can place other types of layers over top of it, however, including adjustment layers and live filters, and any of those layers can have masks to adjust selected areas, so in the end the available functionality when working non-destructively with RAW data - which is what the RAW layers offer - is similar to that of the tools you mentioned, but without the benefit of catalogs or an image browser of any kind to assist with culling or with working between multiple images).

it would be nice to be able to right-click in the pages and masters palettes to cut/copy/paste pages/masters.

A number of users have requested the option of collapsing panels into icons like that, so that piece of this is essentially a duplicate request.
 
As to the concept of the concept of eliminating the panels, that is inconsistent with a professional workflow.  Studio panels are designed to stay accessible by default to provide immediate access to their content.  I don't want to have to click icons on the sides of the screen every time I switch from a color to a text style - both should be in front of me and immediately available without the extra clicks, menu diving, switching tabs, etc.
Granted that there are too many studio panels to keep ALL of them accessible at ALL times - but the idea is that we can set them up and switch them around to match them to the task at hand, laying out the screen to match a workflow in which we are actively involved.
This is not possible with the iPad interface and is one of its limitations as compared to the desktop version at this time.  With the desktop version we can use large, high-resolution displays to organize the panels for increased efficiency of the task we are performing.
 
Note however that even now if you have several panels stacked on top of each other within a set, you can collapse a set of them by clicking on the tab to collapse them down to the tabs.

Maybe as an option, but certainly not as a required feature, and ideally not as a default.
Those who are taking color seriously will generally want to avoid as much color influence as possible from the area surrounding the image.  Spectrally neutral pigment-free neutral gray paint which is designed for environments such as color grading studios can run $120/gallon (and needs to be paired with appropriate lighting to be fully effective).  In environments like that, colored tabs like this would be a major problem, as they are even closer to the image being worked than is the paint on the walls.
Serif already provides the option to make all the icons grayscale, which is likely an important factor for those environments also.

Hope this helps - you can achieve this by designating "selection 2" as a "key object".
Select both shapes, then alt-click (⌥ + click) the "selection 2" object This becomes the "key object" - and is identified with a strong blue outline Clicking the alignment options in the context toolbar will then align everything to this "key object". In your example above, "selection 1" will be aligned to "selection 2" without having to worry about the alignment options and choosing the first or last selected objects. This is referenced in the Affinity help guides here
thanks