The number of times I've wanted to save as XCF in the last 21 years... has been zero.

It's fine for GIMP to have a native format. But it's quite another to try and force the world to use it by making all the other, rather more common, formats second-class citizens.

I know but before you could do both actions using the same dialog.

That's a good point. I understand the importance of having a default format that can preserve every bit of data Gimp is capable of creating. But it makes a lot of sense to have one dialog that can save in both formats, especially since the dialogs support choosing the format automatically based on the extension.

In professional creative software you're not using XCF. Maybe GIMP should change that too? Archaic UI changes to chase some ideal sort of user that doesn't current exist at the expense of your current users is not great.

Unfortunately there are no widely adopted open standards that seem suitable?

Using .PSD as the native format would be risky, its direction is set entirely by Adobe, there are dozens of different versions, and many Photoshop features which would be quite hard to support. And maybe some existing GIMP features would be hard in PSD too. For instance the non-destructive features in PS are mostly "adjustment layers", which might not be exactly the UI concept that GIMP wants to use for non-destructive editing.

But, GIMP does have a PSD file loader/saver. It is always in need of improvements, so any contributions would be very welcomed.

> Unfortunately there are no widely adopted open standards that seem suitable?

Then leave the legacy behavior in place. Telling your existing users that they aren't important enough compared to mythical new users is pretty poor behavior.

> Telling your existing users that they aren't important enough compared to mythical new users is pretty poor behavior.

Never change anything, in other words.

Or, you know, listen to your existing users. For all the bleating about professional features, they sure miss big ones like CMYK support.

Hobbling the save interface only serves to make the lighter weight workflows more difficult (because they're not glamorous for the GIMP devs) while doing zero to improve the more dev-favored workflows.

> Or, you know, listen to your existing users.

We do. All the time.

> For all the bleating about professional features, they sure miss big ones like CMYK support.

Which is being worked on.