Yes- Affinity Designer is also really nice for vector graphics. But they are just clones.

If you are looking for „next-level“ check Nuke (The Foundry)- unless you are painting.

Nuke seems to be a 2D-3D/video compositing application. That’s bringing in a huge amount of complexity if you’re trying to deal with 2D still images. It’s an Adobe After Effects competitor, surely?

Yes it is a postproduction tool and built for compositing but even for still images it is light years ahead of photoshop. It is also rock solid and extremly fast. Simple stuff such as writing a png is 100 times faster.

Isn’t that for video compositing and costs thousands of dollars?