This thread seems to be full of people making baseless assumptions about GIMP that I don't see the GIMP devs themselves make or any open source enthusiast make.

Who here is claiming GIMP is a serious competitor to Photoshop, or even a competitor at all? Even the GIMP team doesn't (https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#are-you-trying-to-dev...).

Or that GIMP is targeting graphics professionals or graphics industry? Don't think so... "We do, however, acknowledge the fact that people will treat GIMP as Photoshop replacement no matter what we tell them, and that’s all right with us. You own this software, it’s up to you to decide how you make use of it."

It is what it is. A tool. That happens to be free and is good enough for some. As somebody above said, it's like complaining why emacs / kate / geany or whatever editor can't do something that visual studio can. If the industry wants a serious competitor to Photoshop, time for them to start building it anew or taking existing free tools nearer to that goal or funding open source devs to do it for them. Complaining and ranting against open source devs who have zero obligations to the industry is not going to achieve anything.