Pixelmator Pro is excellent.

Photoshop’s workflows are etched into my muscle memory, so while I like Affinity Photo, it’s just different enough to be frustrating.

Pixelmator Pro on the other hand works exactly how I expect. It’s quick, fully featured and just plain pleasant to use. Thoroughly recommended.

Same here with the muscle memory. It's nice to hear that Pixelmator is compatible with it. BTW, do you use it on Windows or on a Mac?

Fairly sure it’s Mac only. It’s not a 1:1 replacement, but is similar enough for someone like me who’s used Photoshop for 25+ years to pick up quickly.

Whereas I often find myself having to search through help pages and forums when using Affinity Photo.

For many years I didn’t consider a computer a computer until it had Photoshop on it, but since moving to Pixelmator, Affinity and Figma I’ve been able to ditch Adobe completely.

I was in a marketing research session for Adobe years ago. When they asked me if I’d be happy to pay a monthly subscription for their software instead of the version upgrades, I started openly cursing.

Find a copy of Photoshop CS6. Newer features are not worth the CC grief.

If all you need is Photoshop, that's true. But, IME, nothing steps to Premiere and After Effects, particularly in combination. And modern Premiere is worth paying for, for performance if nothing else. Going back to the scary old days of stuff like Voukoder--no thank you.

(No, definitely not Resolve.)

I recently tried Blender for video editing and was very pleasantly surprised.

Why do you think Resolve is not up to the job?

It's not Premiere. That might sound flip, but Premiere is a learned skill and I have yet to discover really compelling reasons beyond price (which isn't actually that expensive) to use Not Premiere. From a feature perspective its workflow options are sub-par; for example, it doesn't directly interface with After Effects. AE Live Templates in Premiere alone has saved me hours of time rendering out of After Effects. And AE, too, is not optional; while I like AE a lot less than I do Premiere, it sticks because--and there's a theme here--nothing else really does what After Effects does while integrating into an NLE. The ecosystem matters.

I think Resolve is fine if you don't know other tools or your needs are small. I've used it in a pinch before when I didn't have any other options, it's totally usable. And there are some tools (grading, obviously) which are absolutely top notch, and if you are in an all-Blackmagic recording stack I can definitely see some benefits to ease-of-use when, say, pulling video recorded from an ATEM Mini and some Blackmagic cameras. But it's a limited editor with limited compatibility with everything else in my workflow and those of the folks I know.

Another vote for Affinity Photo and the Affinity apps in general actually:

https://affinity.serif.com/

Affinity photo