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Yes, you can specify curves (and create presets) in the Tones tab of Develop persona. To start from a flat preview, set the Develop Assistant's tone curve to "Take no action".

Destructive is better than nothing. Anyway, if you do it to a duplicate of something you want to keep, the original is safe.

You can clear the unwanted channels of an RGB Pixel object: ensure the Pixel object is selected in Layers panel in Channels panel, right-click the thumbnail of each unwanted channel of the Pixel object (not a Composite channel) and pick Clear.

The Eraser Tool in Designer and the Eraser Tool in Photo are identical: if a Pixel object is selected, then the Eraser changes alpha of pixels in the object if a Mask object is selected, then the Eraser changes alpha of pixels in the object if an Adjustment or Live Filter object is selected, then the Eraser changes alpha of pixels in the object's built-in Mask if another type of object is selected, then a Mask for the object is automatically created and selected and then the Eraser changes alpha of pixels in the Mask

Here's another with conical gradient, and using a Symbol for easy tweaking: New Circular Arrows.afdesign

I don't think you need to upload the afdesign file. Your PDF contains a great example of the atrocious mess that can result from Affinity's Boolean operations: hundreds of orange-filled minuscule triangular shards, shapes containing corresponding minuscule triangular holes and facetted edges where there should be smoothly curved edges. Even when these holes and shards and facetted edges are perfectly butted together and contain appropriate colours, fractures appear in renderings because the objects are individually rasterised with antialising and then the rasterisations are composited.

Xor and Combine are different names in different parts of the UI for exactly the same Boolean operation. (Combine is a poor name, in my opinion, since it doesn't suggest how the objects will be combined, whereas Xor is explicit and unambiguous.)

@toltec, I showed that Boolean solution hours ago. It's a XOR blending mode (that could be used for any type of object/layer, not just vectors) that's missing from Affinity apps.

Since it hasn't been added to the Designer Road Map over the last four years, I think we can forget about it appearing before version 2.x, which is probably more than two years away.

Affinity apps lack the blending mode, typically named XOR (meaning exclusive or), which is equivalent to the Combine Boolean.

Use a nondestructive Boolean: select the shape and the text and then alt-click the Combine command.

This is a very well known and officially acknowledged bug. I think the official date for a fix is "soon", which can mean four years or more in Affinityland.

It's not a bug; more like an unfortunate side effect of the way AP (and some other graphics apps) render a zoomed view of an image with live filters. When you are viewing in Develop persona at 19% zoom, the detail refinement filter is being applied to a 25%-scale version of the image instead of the full-sized image and, therefore, you are being misled into thinking the filter is much more effective than it really is. You must view in Develop at 100% zoom to see the true effect of the detail refinement.

There is not a useful way to prevent the scaling. Currently, you would need to ensure that the source and destination object are initially created with the same size, which is completely impractical in normal usage of the apps.