The _one_ thing I wish would be improved is the georeferencing pipeline.

The fact Arc gives you a transparent live preview of where your image will end up is 1000x better than QGISs, "save a tiff, load it, check it, do it again" approach.

It’s been a while since I georeferenced in qgis, but there used to be some great plugins. Looks like some of those are gone now, and the core module has improved a lot. This newer plugin looks promising, though: https://github.com/cxcandid/GeorefExtension

You're so correct. It's an odd shortcoming in the whole suite of tools and I desperately wish it would get a refresh.