Brush workflow issues

[Kuttyjoe]

I can best illustrate this with a simple example.  Draw 3 brush strokes.  Give them each a different color, and use a different brush for each stroke.  First brush Red,  2.Purple, and 3. Green.  If you decide that you wish to continue drawing, using the Red Brush, how do you do it?  The first problem is that there is no way to identify what that brush stroke actually is, even though it's a vector stroke or to recall it's characteristics.  The workflow hits a dead end right there.  It's also buggy.  While holding the Control key, click on the Red brush.  The color wheel reflects to red.  The stroke palette reflects the stroke size.  Great.  Now, make a new brush stroke, and it's green!  Compare this exercise to DrawPlus.  While holding the brush tool, you could tap on the red brush and acquire all of the characteristics of the red brush, and continue drawing with the red brush!  Furthermore, while still holding the brush tool, you could select any or all of the brushes and change their characteristics together. Or, you could select one anchor point on Brush 1, another anchor point on brush 3, then drag the point from 3 to 1 and they would snap and become a single brush stroke, with the same characteristics!  NONE of that is possible in Affinity Designer.  Snapping points together is difficult no matter what tool you're using, or how you attempt to do it.

 Serif had great ideas in DrawPlus, and abandoned half of them in Affinity Designer.  I think the brush workflow is clearly inferior.  There's also the ever expanding layer palette.  By the time you have 10 brush strokes, the layers are already unmanageable. In DrawPlus the layers had similar issues, but you could turn off the ever expanding thing.  Also, texturing vector objects with raster brushes in DrawPlus was done in a single "persona".  All brushes, including the spray type brushes are available in the same workspace.  You could texture a vector object by painting inside the object with the "draw inside" feature. There are some quirks involved, but the ideas was right.  In Affinity Designer, if you want to spray texture inside a vector object, there are more steps. You draw the vector object in the vector persona. Then, switch to the raster persona, create a raster layer, drag it into the vector object in the layers panel, then spray into that raster layer, then return to the vector layer if you want to do something requiring certain tools because these two personas don't have all the same tools.  Back and forth.