[michaelmrose]

> But how this feature can be ignored after people have been begging for it for over a decade now is beyond me.

Because begging for something which ordinarily is very expensive to be done for you for nothing is a meritless activity. An infinity of begging pays for not a single second of developer time.

It is likewise useless to suggest people would use it for free if only a few more million dollars worth of developer time was invested by other people. This isn't an offer of a favor. It's more like me saying that I would gladly come and stay in your guest room if you would only serve me coffee and donuts.

[whywhywhywhy]

If be interested to know what they thought was more important than adjustment layers to work on for a decade instead.

Just developer time alone invested doesn’t have inherent value if it doesn’t make the end product better.

[oblio]

> If be interested to know what they thought was more important than adjustment layers to work on for a decade instead.

Having fun developing whatever stuff they wanted, would be my guess.

And if they're getting paid for this, probably doing a good job convincing whoever's paying them that that stuff is important :-)

[whywhywhywhy]

So which is it? If it's a just for fun project why take feature requests and donations? I make a feature request I get told "well you're not paying for it...", yet they provide no way for me to pay for it. Why not have a bounty system to fund that work if that are your terms?

Just feels what this project is shifts into whatever it needs to be to ensure it doesn't ever get any better or progress in any meaningful way.

[michaelmrose]

Donations are driven presumably by people who are already sufficiently satisfied by current trajectory to want it to continue. Feature requests indicate that they desire to make it useful by understanding what things people want.

There is a difference between desiring to serve users needs and obligation to serve a particular need. No amount of need on your part constitutes an obligation on their part because simply you have paid them nothing and they offered you nothing other than the ability to use the current software as is or modify it. Nor indeed are they obliged to provide you a way to pay them for a particular feature although if you offered them a sufficiently large pile of money you might be able to reach a mutual understanding and certainly nothing prevents you from developing a fork or paying someone to do so right now.

A large problem with such an understanding forming is that the cost of such would be driven by the cost of expensive labor not your perception of the value to an individual end user. I have no idea what the actual cost of this is as I know nothing about their code but lets do a thought experiment.

Imagine if you will that making that happen in 2023 were to require 2 people who currently contribute to gimp part time to work on gimp full time for a year. This would in turn require replacing what they earn at their actual job including benefits. Suppose that for example required replacing $300,000 in wages. Unfortunately they may actually have long term employment that they like and not be enthused about working for one year and then going back on the job market. It might be much more feasible if it were possible to fund gimp development similarly for 5 years enabling not only your feature but others. This costs $1.5M dollars.

If someone responded to your feature request with sure thing will that be check charge or giant bag with a dollar sign I'm guessing you would laugh your ass off and move on.