[Eric_WVGG]

You see this across all the creative fields… tools that are superior to Photoshop and Illustrator have cropped up countless times, but I’ve never met a photographer or graphic designer who could move beyond whatever it was he used in college. It’s a miracle that InDesign even managed to usurp Quark X-Press…

[egypturnash]

A lot of this is that these "superior" tools usually try to implement about 50% of the dinosaur's features. For people who don't use that last arcane 50% they're fine - but for people who do, they're useless.

That said the past few releases of Illustrator have been a mess and I've been getting really tempted to try and see if the latest version of Affinity Design can do all the Illustrator things that I've shaped my workflow around for the last decade. But I feel like if I'm going to spend the time to learn a new tool I'd really rather learn one that's going to open up new places, rather than just take me to the same place in a different way. Which is why I have Blender open in another window right now.

InDesign usurped Quark for a couple of reasons: everyone hated Quark, even people who used it on a daily basis, and Quark took forever to move from MacOS to OSX. That gap offered people a huge excuse to spend some time learning a new tool that held out a hope of sucking less.

[smacktoward]

Don't forget that Quark was also copy-protection mad and insisted on things like stupid hardware dongles if you wanted to actually use the software you bought from them. Forcing paying customers to jump through flaming hoops to use your products is a great way to turn them into ex-customers.