Confidence is waning

[smth]

tl;dr - I would like some reassurance that fixing bugs / improving performance of existing features is a priority.

I just want to say this, because it's in the back of my mind, every time I contemplate using Affinity Designer for a new project. First off, I have/had high hopes for Affinity Designer, its ambition and feature set make it a really powerful and versatile design tool. To be frank, it feels like a potential Illustrator replacement, which is also geared towards layout. I think for a lot of us, that goes a long way towards the dream of cancelling our Adobe contracts (which I think is why everyone is desperate for the final piece of the puzzle - Affinity Publisher).

Having said that, I'm starting to feel like the experience of using Affinity Designer is destined to be one of compromise, or giving up and switching to a competitor's product. There are a lot of bugs and shortcomings, some bigger than others. It's great that we have this forum to discuss them, but the responses often don't go beyond "we are aware".  Workarounds are welcome in the short term, but without knowing when a bug will be fixed, or having the confidence at least that it will be within a short time frame, it's difficult to invest in Affinity as a viable option for the future.

To give a little context, I guess the issues I'm thinking about here are those around vector operations - the problems with booleans, and outline stroke. I don't think there's any dispute that these things don't work well currently. I'm concerned that issues like these are considered "would be nice to fix", rather than "shit, out app is fundamentally broken". If Affinity Designer is serious about being a vector drawing tool (which I think it is), then I feel like the response should be the latter. In my opinion, these convenient ways of doing complex operations are not bells and whistles, but central to why we buy sophisticated apps for doing this stuff.

Beyond these well documented problems, there have also been one of two issues that I have raised, that were dismissed as (rightly or wrongly) just me not understanding the intention of a feature, or something. This is also concerning.

As an outsider, I obviously have no idea what priorities Serif has, what resources, or where they are being used. I can give my impression from this perspective however, and that is that Serif is doing a great job of delivering a range of feature rich apps across multiple platforms; but not such a great job of making at least one of those apps, live up to (my) expectations.

I hope this feedback is useful, and is taken in the spirit of wanting the Affinity products to succeed.