> Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period.

FWIW, painting is one of the easiest pieces of software to get right. As much as I couldn't replicate the volume of stuff Adobe has done in 30+ years, I could build the bones of Photoshop in a few months, with modular extensibility frameworks to slot everything else in.

Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today.

The basic data model is a grid of pixels, organized with layers, and having masks, and an extensible set of tools to operate on them. You also need a little bit of "other" for things like editable text, before it is flattened into the above. Add modular tools and filters, and you're 90% of the way there.

Most of the value-add of Photoshop is simply developer time to add a comprehensive set of tools. Adobe can hire a researcher to tweak some algorithm for years, and at this point they've got a lot.

Basic video editing is similar. Linear streams, in layers, with modular filters and effects.

I'm much more impressed with Adobe drawing tools, page layout, and animation. That's HARD because there aren't the same kinds of clean data models and abstractions. These are harder to use, and don't feel as polished, but that's not because they're less well-written, but because they solve a harder problem. I could NOT build the core of that myself in a reasonable amount of time.

> Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today.

Ask any designer and they’ll laugh at you for bringing up in Gimp compared to Photoshop. Photoshop is 10x better. It’s easy to say it’s easy to make Photoshop, but they didn’t. It’s like a poor person saying it’s easy to be a millionaire if they wanted to.