[wlesieutre]

There was Seashore, which was a simpler image editor based on GIMP, but native integration never seemed to be a priority for GIMP. I think there's a commonly held view on open source projects that they're all doing you a service, and if you don't like the tool they wrote you can fix it yourself or use something else. I can't say there's anything particularly wrong with that view, but it doesn't always lead to the greatest user experience.

I can only assume that someone (or several someones) with the time and knowhow to get this done finally came along and decided it was worth investing their time in. I doubt it's as exciting as working on the image editing features.