I was just yesterday talking with a friend of mine who worked in architecture visualization and told me that basically the main reason he cannot use blender, even though he'd really like to learn it (and it would save him money on licensing), and he uses 3ds max instead is that 3ds max can read (he didn't care about writing) all the file formats from more specialized software (not max files) that his clients send to him and that is basically the reason every firm that does the same thing cannot use blender.

When i suggested that maybe some of those firms could pay developers to implement and/or improve support for those formats, he said that none would do such a thing as the bigger firms who can pay developers do not really care and can afford to use 3ds max while those who would benefit more by switching to blender (smaller firms and freelancers) cannot pay the developers.

I've used Gimp, Inkscape, and others... but sometimes you just need to get work done, and the closed source proprietary application is what you need, I'm sorry to say.

Donating thousands of dollars to Gimp today isn't going to put it on par with Photoshop today... I wish it would. Maybe it could be in a few years... but I need to get work done right now.

Sometimes you do need a commercial interest behind something to drive it's progress. That doesn't mean it has to be closed and proprietary, but they often are, sadly.