I just recently purchased Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for my Macbook Pro laptop.
Most importantly, I want these softwares to remove my dependency on the industry standard softwares I have been using for the last over 20 years - Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw.
Affinity Designer did open up my Adobe Illustrator files but did not add the elements which were placed outside the page. If it could open up the complete AI file as it is with all the elements, both on the page and outside the page, it will be wonderful. It will save a ton of work for designers who routinely put a few objects outside the page knowing they may need to use it later.
I recently created a complex branding guideline brochure for a client entirely in Adobe Illustrator using multiple Artboards for making a multiple page document. Affinity Designer will make it impossible to create such a document. You really need to consider either giving it a multiple page feature or a multiple artboard feature which can make it easy to create a multiple page document.
The biggest feature request I ask of you is CorelDraw file support. Affinity Designer should be able to open or import a CorelDraw document. CorelDraw has been a world favourite of designers and illustrators for decades and is one huge reason many designers have not moved to Mac because there is no Corel version for Mac. This is also one reason I have sacrificed a 100GB on my Macbook to install Windows through Bootcamp. Just so that I could keep using CorelDraw. My first response to using Affinity Designer was delight since I found it more intuitive and friendlier to work with than Adobe Illustrator (which is why I had not been able to completely move to Illustrator all these years). If you add CorelDraw file support I may finally be able to ditch Bootcamp and Corel and move my complete design workflow to Affinity. And I can assure you there are thousands of designers out there working on Macs who are looking for a CorelDraw replacement (have gone through a lot of blog posts and forums when I myself was looking for one).
Lastly, is there any way that the sidepanel (Studio) can be hidden with just a small arrow/tab peeking out clicking on which pops it out into view again?
Hope you find the above ideas and requests worthy of your time and respond positively.