[Hamcha]

I'll my personal experience as someone who still prefers many proprietary softwares over open source (assuming the price is fair and the features are much much better):

- Photoshop is a market leader so definitely an exception. I personally miss apps like "Made with Mischief" which had unique features that I loved that are still not yet replicated but have completely disappeared and the only way to use them is to find shady places giving out cracked versions (even when I have a license).

- If there's enough demand for a feature, you can fork and bring it back. Waterfox is a popular example of push-back to some of Mozilla decisions (like killing XUL) and is still maintained and loved.

- I love thinkering with formats, but unless you rely on the reverse engineering community at large picking your favorite format apart, you're not gonna get far without a lot of background. I use Affinity Photo/Designer, two popular alternatives to Photoshop/Illustrator, which use their afphoto/afdesign formats and there's no published spec about them. If I ever wanted to do a tool that deals with them I'd have no starting point.