Are the V2 products less flaky than V1, or do they mostly have new features?

[JakeStaines]

A couple of years ago I started using the Affinity suite to replace my ancient copies of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and while they're generally great for the price and for the most part I understand why feature focus has been where it is (as much as I'd like grep styles and vector fills!) over the years I've noticed a number of annoying quirks that add up to a kind of mediocre experience overall. I'm sure none of these can be intentional so I assume they're defects, but they're mostly inconsistent enough I've never found a reliable repro. Can anyone tell me whether these are things that they've also experienced in V1 but have been fixed in V2? I'm very happy to pay the upgrade price if my experience is going to improve, but I don't see anything compelling for my use-cases in the new features list so if the same quirks and annoyances are likely to persist I probably won't bother.

The things that happen the most frequently are the following - although there's a myriad other things that are more intermittent so I only remember when they start happening again! These are mostly just for Publisher and Designer, which I use far more often than Photo.

• I never have any idea where the style used comes from when I start drawing a shape with the pen tool in Designer. It's not my current settings, it's not the style I have selected in the style palette, it's not the style of the last object I had selected (which is what I was used to in Illustrator) - and worse, it's almost always some obnoxious combination of characteristics that I set up for a one-off use and don't actually want ever again. Right now, I'm trying to do some small no-stroke flat-fill shapes to shade and highlight some lineart and whenever I start a new shape it keeps my current style for the first node, but as soon as I click a second node it abruptly switches to no-fill, a thick stroke, and giant circles on both ends of the line. This alone has had me on the verge of reinstalling Illustrator pretty much every time I use Designer.
• Leaving the app open for more than a couple of hours has it take up more and more memory and get choppier and choppier. I've noticed this with both Publisher and Designer. Closing it down and re-opening generally clears the problem, and I appreciate if I left it open for days I'm asking for problems like this, but it doesn't feel like I should have to do this when I've just been sat here working for a couple of hours straight.
• Printing from directly within Designer or Illustrator messes up a lot of vector shapes intermittently. Very commonly gradient-filled shapes have the gradient printed as an unclipped rectangle extending past their edges. Sometimes text jumps around and rescales itself, and in one print I did yesterday the fill of some text was squished and moved to the side, while the outlines of the same text stayed in the right position and proportion! Exporting the same document to PDF and then printing the PDF works fine, but I don't print often enough to remember every time and again it feels like I shouldn't have to.
• Clicking on the entries in the Appearance panel to change the stroke or fill settings seems to take a random number of clicks to open the settings pull-out. Sometimes I click the coloured circle next to a fill once and it opens up the settings fine; other times I have to click two times, and a third click closes it again; sometimes it just never opens, and I have to switch to a different selection and back again before I'm allowed to open the fill settings!

Are any of these known to have been fixed in V2?

[GarryP]

From my experience:

1. “I never have any idea where the style used comes from…” - I don’t think the reasoning behind this has changed in V2.

2. “Leaving the app open for more than a couple of hours has it take up more and more memory” – I can’t say if that’s changed or not but I had not seen the problem in V1 either.

3. “Printing from directly within Designer or Illustrator messes up a lot of vector shapes intermittently.” - I have seen various problems with printing from V2 in the forums which sound like what you are expressing.

4. “Clicking on the entries in the Appearance panel to change the stroke or fill settings seems to take a random number of clicks” – This is still the same as far as I can tell.

[v_kyr]

If you monitor the corresponding forum's "Bug Reporting" sections after the Affinity V2 apps fos OS'es you have, you should sooner or later recognize & know then, which older bugs persisted, or which bugs have now been newly introduced, etc.! 

[JakeStaines]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

From my experience:

...

Cheers - sounds like a shame, I guess I'll carry on with V1 for now, then. As it goes, though - regarding #1, do you have any idea what that reasoning is? So far as I can tell it just seems to get attached to a particular set of appearance attributes at random and keep using them until it happens to change its mind and get stuck on a different set at some point in the future; if there's an actual deterministic process that I could work with - regardless of whether I think it's sensible - that would be an improvement!  

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

If you monitor the corresponding forum's "Bug Reporting" sections after the Affinity V2 apps fos OS'es you have, you should sooner or later recognize & know then, which older bugs persisted, or which bugs have now been newly introduced, etc.! 

Sure, but since there's a sale on right now to encourage people to upgrade, I'd rather find out sooner than later! I'll keep an eye on stuff in the latest versions anyway - who knows, maybe there'll be some compelling new feature - but if it were the case that some or all of these issues were already resolved, I'd jump on the suite upgrade straight away.