A major barrier to the improvement of giant FOSS replacements like GIMP and LibreOffice is that the people who develop it and the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks. It's extremely hard to identify the rough edges in a UI without an external perspective.

Blender is a little different because every 3D modeling program is odd in its own way, and the new UI was close enough that it was easy to learn after the transition (I do still use the legacy keybinds though).

But Blender is very niche hobby software. To "succeed" (if we define success as capturing a significant user share from closed source spyware), Libre and GIMP need to offer workflows that are close to what the average non-coder technical person expects. Maybe that isn't valued by the teams, or maybe they don't have enough resources to make it happen, but the end result is a reputation of jank.

I dislike vibe coded clones because of concerns about the engineering quality. But the reason they're making waves when traditional FOSS hasn't is that the UX is leagues ahead.

> But Blender is very niche hobby software

I don't think this is entirely accurate at this point. It has pretty wide adoption in the educational space, and a number of well-known studios have adopted Blender into their workflows.

The Blender development fund wouldn't be topped-up to the tune of $3 million/year if it were purely funded by hobbyists.

After 5 years of KDE, I now got Gnome on my office laptop since 3 days. I'm cursing quite a lot on it. All my hotkeys are failing, everything is in the wrong place, and the whole UI feels wrong and broken.

Now partially it is because Gnome is oversimplified, but a big thing is just that I have to unlearn a lot of habits. So I won't switch to KDE for at least a month, as I need to get out of my comfort zone.

I use blender a bit. I still cant figure out the hotkeys. Its the most unpleasant to use software i know of. If the alternatives werent outrageously expensive, I wouldnt touch it

> […] the people who use it have become very used to all of its quirks.

Oh definitely. The way some people seem oblivious to all of Word's faults and weirdness― …Oh! You weren't talking about Microsoft Word!

Software having some quirks is fine. Most people would be fine with LibreOffice if they were taught the rudiments of word processing (that; not using Word, but actual word processing) and never came into a situation where they had to use Word or Google Docs.

The difference between all those tools is that LibreOffice will still do its thing in the future. Just as it has done for a long while, while Word will have forced some new subscription model on you and force-fed you some AI-integration, and Google will have done some similar googley shit.