I have never used photoshop and I still feel unsatisfied with GIMP. I have a long list of thoughts but the simplest one was the fact that moving/rotating/scaling a layer is 3 different tools. I was told a long time ago that there was work to merge them, years later the change comes out and it just groups the tools under one icon so you now have to right click first to select the tool you want. It's pretty much broken on a 4k display as well.

I do like gimp as a bit of a Swiss army knife program, it can do a lot of utility jobs like resizing, outlining, etc which can be hard in some of the more intuitive modern apps, but most of my work now is done on an app like Procreate and then I'll move to gimp for the final edits.

Gimp certainly has its GUI problems - coming back to it after using Darktable has been quite painful. I can accept it has GUI issues. However, for what it does, the only tool that is better is Photoshop. Sure, Lightroom/Darktable has a lot of nifty convenient stuff with a better GUI, but they're simply not a viable replacement for Gimp.

There are other photo editing tools with better UI, but poorer features, sadly. It would take a ton of work to catch up in terms of features.

> I have a long list of thoughts but the simplest one was the fact that moving/rotating/scaling a layer is 3 different tools.

You might find that fact to be on the ageing side :) Unified Transform tool has been available for many years now. It's all three (and more) tools in one.

If anything Gimp is too much like Photoshop. Corel Photo-paint has a much more powerful paradigm of manipulable bitmap objects rather than shoehorning everything into fixed dimension layers. It's unfortunate it never got any respect and withered.