I distinctly and fondly remember Photoshop 4 and 5 coming out and the features they added. I used Photoshop pretty heavily from 2.5 through 7. I still use my old-ass copy of 7 for Windows today because it's got features other editors lack and I am really familiar with the UI. I don't forget having to jump through hoops in Photoshop 3. But I had to jump through fewer in 4 and pretty much none in 5 and onwards.

So GIMP not having CMYK, or any color space support besides RGB, is actually sort of amusing. Just through version 7 Photoshop added vector shapes, history brush, adjustment layers, and a bunch of other stuff GIMP still lacks. It's an FOSS project so it's not like I'm saying the GIMP developers are bad, they clearly are quite talented.

What I'm saying is GIMP today is not as capable as Photoshop from 25 years ago. It's good enough for a lot of people but useless for others. I've been hearing your arguments about GIMP for as long as it has existed. It has a lot of capability and works for your use case so that must mean it just works for everyone. It's great that it works for some people. But you can't pretend Photoshop hasn't improved faster than GIMP. If you need anything beyond basic destructive editing GIMP is just not appropriate.