The developer of a $50,000,000 project is going to pay several million dollars in design fees. There's a lot of value proposition in an easy button. However a lot of domain knowledge is necessary to produce something reliable.
Either way - developing a product to compete with PhotoShop or AutoCad - is a big dollar proposition. There's more capital investment that winds up requiring AutoCad than PhotoShop. A lot of what PhotoShop does is a nice-to-have. Building departments require building plans. Paving contractors require road plans. A billion dollars in those industries isn't even news.
I'm not sure if there will be an android port of Antigen. The mobile gaming scene is not very conducive to indie devs at the moment:) I also didn't write it in a very cross-platform manner. I won't make that mistake again.
In another field, Blender will make you go insane if you try to do any engineering work with it. On the other hand doing art with OpenSCAD (you type code with primitives) would probably also suck, though it's good for engineering simple objects precisely.
If you could get the best of both worlds, then yes, but I think you run into limits with scripting in Photoshop alternatives quite quickly.
To most artists of that type I know, the idea of just recording a Photoshop macro to automate a repetitive task is getting into the dark arts. Command lines are scary places to them.
And that's discounting the 2D artists who work in physical media because "computer art has no soul".
There are exceptions - I mean, I used to futz around with assembly programming on my c64 and Amiga, there are people whose visual medium is Processing, there are people making games who are comfortable with one foot in the imagery and one foot in the code - but I am pretty sure that "emacs meet pixels" would not find much traction with the people who use Photoshop as a canvas.
I mean, if "Photoshop" to you is "a bunch of image filters", then sure, we already have "emacs meets pixels" in the person of ImageMagic. But to a 2D artist, Photoshop is not "a bunch of image filters"; it's "paintbrush and canvas".
To put it another way, a piece of software can be the important artefact. The design for a building is rarely the important artefact. By "making the design his own" an architect produces something for himself, but this is not the important [public] artefact. Moreover, making the design an expression of the architect is often in conflict with the objectives of the client. Guild like structures allow architects to express themselves in ways contrary to the interests of their clients.
Yes, there are projects where developers want architects. Much of the construction industry, however, sees architects as a necessary (or unnecessary) drag upon the project's objectives. Regulatory requirements for an architects involvement are the basis of many an architect's business.
Frank Gehrey is the outlier. AutoCAD LT is very common.
The command line in Photoshop would be a way of improving productivity. As an example, I don't know any power-user/really productive Autocad user that works with the GUI. It's a waste of time.