Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - something like $200 if i recall correctly).
Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.
I still use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 every single day. It runs flawlessly in Windows 7 if you set compatability mode on the EXE to "Windows 2000".
Version 6 was the last good version before Corel muddled up the interface and made it bloated. I can still do some things in 2 clicks that my coworker needs 5-15 clicks to get done in Photoshop. It surprises me to know some things are still so "complicated" in photoshop, just by how many clicks/steps are needed. I'm sure PSP 6 is borderline abandonware at this point, released 16 years ago in 2000! I upped the full version here (15mb): http://www.filedropper.com/psp6
Wine! For older programs it works especially well. I've had a legal copy of Photoshop 7.0 for Windows since middle school and I have been running it without any problems since then.
It sounds to me like you're describing Affinity Designer - you might want to check it out if you haven't already. It's relatively very cheap and one of the few pieces of software that I use daily that I am very happy paying the list price for!
I vaguely remember having Jasc installed as a kid and it was indeed great!
Affinity Designer is really great for vector graphics, and exporting to raster. Super fast. Super easy to learn.
Their developers are very active. They have a beta available to owners. I've encountered a few minor bugs in their App Store version, downloaded the beta, and noticed it was fixed.
Second this! I loved PSP and used it daily. When I lost the binary I hunted around for a replacement for ages and finally settled on Paint.NET. It's not as good but works well enough.
Somehow Fireworks is still clinging to life and largely unchanged from the Macromedia days I think. I still find it ridiculously useful for web and mockups.
I still use it on Ubuntu, with Wine. It runs almost flawlessly and it's so much better than all the image editing tools out there (most are crap, Gimp is too bloated).
Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.