[krapp]

Problem is, the open source community apparently decided Gimp and Inkscape were probably good enough, and few people who've ever used Adobe software would likely agree.

Never mind that employers probably won't have them installed, and probably won't allow them to be used in house, they won't care if Gimp and Inkscape are on your resume if they're looking specifically to hire for photoshop/illustrator experience, and these alternatives would also have to deal with proprietary image formats, which might make the end result unacceptable to free software purists.

[nfoz]

> Problem is, the open source community apparently decided Gimp and Inkscape were probably good enough

I suspect the projects are just short on developer effort, and that no-one decided it was "good enough" to not need improvement. If you are submitting patches that are being denied by the project maintainers, you are welcome to fork the project. That is the "open source community".

[tlow]

This is an excellent point. You don't necessarily need to start from scratch if there are existing projects which you might be able to contribute to. If you don't like the direction of certain decisions, you are certainly free to fork the project and continue in your own direction as well.

[csense]

I'll grant you that Gimp's user interface is kind of a mess, but what specifically is wrong with Inkscape?

[krapp]

Actually... apart from some things like not having a mesh transform, extrude, skew and support for some color schemes, Inkscape is pretty nice, your comment encouraged me to try it out again. Apparently it will export in Illustrator's ai format as well. I was probably a bit rash to lump Inkscape in there.