It's so true.
I abandoned the Adobe suite when they went to monthly pricing – What amateur/home/hobby user can afford it? Such a missed opportunity in the name of greed and profit – and I've been generally happy with the Affinity suite. Don't get me wrong, Adobe is in business to make a profit, but they abandoned a large part of their users to court the corporate dollar. #smh
But Affinity's apps are simply not as polished as the very mature Adobe apps. Little annoyances here and there (like mine, above) make the overall experience frustrating and time-zapping.
#sigh
I do something like you do. Except I wrote some C++ code to read the SVG file. Any transform causes my code problems. I'm too lazy to figure out how transforms work and add the code to handle the transforms. Instead I have created a preset that just flattens all transforms. Give this a try.