I'm not sure why it would bother you that some people are satisfied with a piece of free software. That seems kinda weird to me tbh.

GIMP version 3.0, which was released on March 16th, introduced non-destructive editing. It supports non destructive editing with gradients through the use of layer effects and masks.

Not sure what you mean by 'better selection tools', but the ones they do have work just fine for how I use the program.

I am not a professional graphic designer, and I have never printed an image I made or tweaked with GIMP, so I'm not sure I would benefit from CMYK color space editing.

I'm sure you will say it is also shit, and I don't have as much experience with it as I do GIMP but Inkscape is an open source vector graphics program that a lot of people seem to like, so it's nice that we have that option for people whom it would be sufficient.

I'm not against people paying for programs they need to do their jobs, but I wish more people who believe in software freedom were willing to donate to Open Source projects that they use, or even ones that have the potential to be competitive, but aren't quite there yet.

If professionals who rely on pro software, but also believe in software freedom would donate a fraction of what they spend on Pro software to projects like the GIMP, you would undoubtedly see a lot of the missing features show up in them.

As it stands most people either use the software and don't donate, or pay $165 and up for software and then compare it to software that costs $0, as if that is any kind of a fair comparison.

My point was simply that most people aren't professionals, and paying almost $700/year seems like overkill for people who want to occasionally create a meme or retouch a digital photo.

For people that absolutely have to have Pro software, clearly it's not going to be competitive, but I sure am glad that it's there for people who aren't pros.