Jowday

What color format are you working in? See Document -> Convert format with the picture open.
Topaz plugins and many others do not support all color modes/formats. When they don't support a format (fx CMYK, LAB) they are greyed out. But sRGB 8/16 should work.
On this Windows 10 machine they work as they did in 1.6 - but of course OS X is another story.

I also think that, the Burn tool a revision is needed.
see image.
As you might expect, Photoshop does the best job followed by Gimp.
The bottom line is unfortunately Affinity Photo
The test is done with similar setting of the Burn tool.

There is definitely something up with the Dodge and Burn Tools.
The attached image shows a Grey Scale with 100% Opacity and Flow Dodge and Burn Brushes drawn horizontally as follows...
 
Burn Highlight  - Looks OK possibly burning more shadow detail than I would have thought
Burn Middle Tones - Probably OK surprised it darkened the whole range
Burn Shadows  - Hmm seems to really burn middle tones more than anything!
Then 
Dodge Highlight - OK
Dodge Middle Tones - Probably OK again quite surprised it lightened the whole range
Dodge Shadows - Something wrong here looks just like the middle tone dodge.
Definitely looks like some work needs to be done here or am I missing something?
Cheers 
 
Andrew
 

Well, I had no idea! Thank you so much! That never occurred to me! 
I will check that. 
Have a good one!

What color format are you working in? See Document -> Convert format with the picture open.
Topaz plugins and many others do not support all color modes/formats. When they don't support a format (fx CMYK, LAB) they are greyed out. But sRGB 8/16 should work.
On this Windows 10 machine they work as they did in 1.6 - but of course OS X is another story.

@Aammppaa  Your screenshots doesn't display 

Rest assured that pro/semi pro photographers use professional software. Not AP.  This software is targeting another segment of users with smaller budgets. But that is beside your main (valid) point.

Blend Tool is a must have!!!

How can Affinity photo be taken seriously by pro and semi pro photographers when it advertisises within its software an agency undermining those photographers?

Highlight/shadow recovery in Affinity Photo is very primitive where ever I find it. Unusable I would say. But the code behind is probably not trivial; Adobe purchased a small company behind an upcoming RAW converter many years ago to get their algorithms for Adobe Camera Raw. The results must look natural. Still, it surprises me that Serif couldn't develop a more advanced algorithm. From time to time I get the feeling Serif needs more specialists.

The possibility to change anytime to the pointer tool only pressing command. And only staying in the tool as long as the command key is being pressed. (Like in Illustrator and old FreeHand)
Also, if possible, the possibility to alternate by pressing for example alt key to switch between select by case sensitive next objects.
Basically, a shortcut to this preference option: (Select object when intersects with selection marquee).

Please let Affinity apps recognise profiles with the .icm extension (which is the default on the Windows platform), working around the .icc only thing is time consuming, boring and annoying.
For those of us working in a studio environment where hundreds of colour profiles are stored on a server, and who don't want to stick them all in the OS's default location on each workstation, what do you suggest? It should be a simple matter to connect to a shared folder containing such assets, but none of the Affinity apps want to know.

@mfarooqi I agree - the default keypress is horrible!
Affinity uses the double click to enter containers and drill down one layer, so I'd like to see Modifier + Double Click be used to jump up one layer. Perhaps Alt + Double Click?

Oh sorry. I thought the thread was Windows only. Its both. 
You are right and the bug is not trivial. It is rather confusing. The changes made to the pen tool in 1.7 are not yet waterproof.
I was commenting on the others.  I assumed @squirrelfireknew what he was doing. He did.

@Jowday Thank you very much for confirming the problem and submitting the bug report. It's nice to have confirmation of the change and hopefully this is just a bug and not an intended change as I initially assumed. :)

Actually investigating the problem and comparing v1.6 to 1.7 is the proper approach! 
Confirmed - it is a regression. Hopefully not changed and intended behavior. In version 1.6.5.123 the pen tool works exactly as described by @squirrelfire
1.6.5: Create a closed shape with the pen tool. When you hover the nodes a minus symbol is displayed next to the pen tool. If you click and drag the node with the left button you can round and shape the tool.
1.7.0: Create a closed shape with the pen tool. When you hover the node that closed the shape a minus symbol is displayed next to the pen tool. If you click and drag the node with the left button you can round and shape the tool. Hovering ANY other node displays an... anchor symbol... and clicking and dragging add new curve to the selected curves object. The "Add new curves to existing curves" is always on when using the pen tool no matter if the toolbar button is selected or not.
.... but if you click on one of the cursed nodes with the node tool - just once - you can again manipulate it with the pen tool.
If this is intended behavior then... 
I reported the issue in the report bug thread:
 

firstdefense, unfortunately that doesn't seem to make any difference for me on any of my systems.
Peter Petrenko, I don't think that is really relevant to my complaint. My issue is specifically with a change in functionality of the pen tool.

Thank you everybody for the comments.  @jmwellborn, it's our honor to serve you, honestly.
@Jowday, thanks for taking a crack at it--I saw the leveling of the formation, looks good   I like the lightening of the paneling inside the open bay doors, it enhances the contrast for that photo from the other two.
My first attempt (y'all are seeing attempt #3) was cropped like your second post.  I had just the center group, but when I added the side formations at later days' shots I had to include the entire hangar to make it fit the 8x10.  Interestingly enough, this was used as a gift for our outgoing Chief, and included in the frame was the original blueprint for the hangar from 1930's, so having the blueprint on the bottom of the frame and the whole hangar as a photo on the top turned out to be aesthetically pleasing and fit well.
For history buffs, our hangar was burned out during the Dec 7 Pearl Harbor attack, with several other hangars behind ours hit worse or just as bad.  Below is a photo of Hangar 11 or 15 which is a few rows behind ours.
(visit source for much larger view: https://vintagetopia.co/2018/08/09/19-interesting-facts-about-the-attack-on-pearl-harbor/)
 

It's disillusioning. I've twice asked for help. Instead of advice, I'm met with snide and snarky remarks. I'm happy you have everything all worked out, but some of us come for assistance, not to get slapped down.

I love the Affinity suite of products and have been using both Photo and Designer for over a year now and the beta for Publisher since that began (and just pre-ordered), but one thing that I find frustrating is that the File->Export always defaults to the last save location.  In my personal workflow almost always want to save along side of the file I am working on, but in my workflow those files are always in different folders as I use the folder structure to keep the projects together, source images, other pieces for the puzzle, etc, but when it comes to the export I almost never want to be exporting to the last save location, but rather to the location at which the current file was opened from.  I understand that this may not be for everyone, but I think it would be great to see it as an option in the settings menu.

Monster Selfie No 2

I saw the implementation thanks to a guy on youtube. Though it is completely useless because it is not in Designer. I would need to purchase Photo just to add perspective to bitmaps, and that would only cover 30% of my perspective needs. I need perspective as a part of my main design process inside the same tool which can apply/modify perspective on the fly to bitmaps, vectors and symbol instances.

Affinity Photo perspective implementation is really beautifully made and this is exactly what I'm asking here as a feature of Designer.

 

For creative label designs, and for 3-D mock-ups (e.g., bending & distorting vector art to appear to wrap around a bottle), It would be great to have a non-destructive vector warp and distortion tool. Should work both on grouped and ungrouped object layers, and should work on live, editable text layers.
I would like to request that the Mesh Warp tool be adapted to and included in Designer for vector and text layer artwork.

This was mainly to try a few different ways of doing things to see if the extra effort was worthwhile or not. The main thing was not to use gradients but draw a bunch of objects to make pseudo-gradients so you've a bit more control over things. There a few rough bits like the leaves but it's ok. As usual it took longer than I expected, I should really have learnt by now.

Hey! As you might have noticed I like moon and nighttime pictures, so here is my another take on photo manipulation in Affinity Photo. Version 1.7 brought quite a few features that made compositing easier. New HSL adjustment is something I've been waiting for.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/167401184@N05/with/48020464082/