> Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders.

I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.

I don’t know if you can really say that Photoshop wasn’t a market leader from day one. It basically created the market on the Mac when it was introduced in 1990 and has been the market leader since.

If you want to limit standard Office productivity to ones that were written with the GUI in mind, MS Office was the leader on the Mac before it came to PCs and crushed WordPerfect and Lotus early on.

> I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet.

Mine aren't: GIMP is okay, FreeCAD is a complete joke. It is painfully obvious that their development is done primarily by F/LOSS enthusiasts rather than by industry professionals and UX designers. They are closer to being a random collection of features than a professional workhorse. You might eventually get the job done, but compared to the proprietary competition it is woefully incomplete, overly complicated, and significantly buggier.

The poor quality of FreeCAD is the main reason my 3D printer is collecting dust. As a Linux-only user the proprietary alternatives mostly aren't available to me, and FreeCAD is bad enough that I'd rather not do CAD at all. The Ondsel fork was looking promising for a while, but sadly that died off.

LibreOffice, GIMP, FreeCAD and Inkscape all have their quirks (and bugs), but they're probably seen as features by their core users so they won't change.