I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.

When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.

I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.

Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.

Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.

The truth is that people are shit at using a computer (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/). At some point we need to draw the obvious conclusion from that: users capable of useful contribution to a project are a significant minority compared to the number of users who need or wish to use that software. How many people develop software? About 5%. How many people need to use software? 95% or more? Point being, no matter how important or unimportant your software is, you are guaranteed to have a user base predominantly incapable of contributing to the project.

This is why the constant responses of, "Patches welcome," or similar in response to user complaints is so hostile to users. It's saying to users, "This application is only for experts," which is likely to only appeal to experts. Since experts are so rare, that doesn't seem like a particularly inspiring response. You're just driving users away from your project.

Yes, anybody can contribute to an open source project. No, not everybody is capable of doing so meaningfully. Yes, anybody can recognize a bad design or bug. No, not everybody is capable of recognizing a good or correct design or fixing a bug. If Linux is to ever become an operating system for the desktop, we must accept that the majority of users are not going to be developers, and a user cannot be expected to become a developer just because they want to use a computer. It is no longer 1975.

The only exception to the above is if your project has a user base entirely devoted to programmers. That's precisely why those projects get so much development time.