Can you give a source for that? I thought they are doing fine.

They are doing fine for the casual user and you can't beat the price.

However, as I started using it more professionally a few years ago, there are some real problems with long standing bugs in some areas.

My biggest complain at the moment is Art Boards. I use them for almost all my work. Allows me to work much faster when working on a suite of related projects.

However, they are the most broken of all features. Probably half of all the Affinity photo live effects are broken in art boards. Also, not sure which is worse, Affinity or the users. I've opened so many bugs on art boards, to have users push back and say it is not a bug and then Affinity ignores it. They say it is not a bug because most don't use art boards as they never grasp the use case.

This is also my experience. The forums were dismal, everything is "That's not a bug". Sorry, but exporting images from designer that are incredibly blurry for no reason is a bug. Please try explaining resolution to me again, I swear I still didn't understand it after the first few game engines I've made.

Photo also degrades images by blurring them. You see it when you’re building a composition and merging layers as you go; the underlying image gets blurrier and blurrier. Photo simply can’t be trusted not to ruin your work.

This has come up repeatedly in the forums as new users discover it. And yep, the apologists cried and thrashed, issuing one ridiculous excuse after another. Even someone from Affinity.

I wish someone there would teach me about layer blending. I still don’t get it after building high-end compositing software for film.

> their developers have posted very publicly about being miserable there.

Just curious, do you have a reference?

I've complained on the forums for years about the bugs and Affinity never responds. As I've been using it for years, I figured out how to work around many bugs, but it is a field of landmines for sure.

It is indeed disappointing as it offers the best workflow for the kind of work I do.

Their Glassdoor and some Twitter accounts I followed, it's been years though.

Plus if you've ever interacted on their forums their mods are really pushy and dismissive.

> forums their mods are really pushy and dismissive

Yes I agree. I argued with them at length about having a real process for handling bugs that is transparent. They have no method of evaluating the need or priority of anything as they rely only on their forum.

Basically somewhat the gist is that some time ago Affinity decided due to a lot of negative complaints they simply will be less transparent about everything so that nobody could complain. The result of course was obvious, all complaints became about the lack of transparency. Which also resulted in many content creators dropping Affinity because they felt the product didn't have a future as no more communication from the company. So there went their free advertising as well. Terrible management decisions for sure.