Kinda related, I saw this fascinating presentation by Trevor Paglen recently. It's about the footprint of secrecy. It's almost a decade old, but still very much worth your time.
This is awesome, never heard of it until now. Seriously cool bit of software. Love that it uses Courier Prime as well, it's my default font everywhere!
Email Tim. I sent an email as a last resort, and an issue affecting my account was resolved a few days later. This is after about 18 months of almost weekly calls updating me about my case. Maybe a coincidence, maybe an assistant forwarded it somewhere.
I was fortunate enough to get my not so uncommon name as my gmail address. I must be the only person not using it anymore. I've tried getting PayPal and Uber and to delete the accounts other people have created using this gmail, but no luck. Circular, bot-like responses from Uber, no response from PayPal. I can't take over the accounts as the users have added a phone number. Similarly, kinda, but I'm locked out of a Bandcamp account as they send a verification code to me@domain-i-no-longer-own.com whew.
I don't know how you people do it, if I had to have 18 months of weekly calls with Apple support about an account issue before then emailing the CEO, I probably would have burned all of my Apple devices and bought a dumb phone instead.
After using Adobe stuff for many years, my stubbornness, with regards to subscriptions and cloud things, led me to buy the various bits of desktop Affinity software. I think they were only about £30 a piece, which isn't bad, but you really aren't buying Photoshop or Illustrator. Designer is a bit of a kludge, and V1 did seem like a work-in-progress. I was hoping a knife tool would be added before we got to V2.
There are techniques I'd been using for a long time, complicated little tasks with, on the face of it, simple results, that I wasn't able to reproduce in AD without a lot of thinking and farting around. For better or worse, this pushed me to change things up and explore other methods, and now I've learnt how to achieve things with programming, whether that's Processing or little things for Blender.
I know people operating businesses who've just stuck with an old computer running an old non-subscription version of the Adobe software they depend on. They don't really need anything from modern versions (some have been doing things since the '70s, adding computers to the mix in the '90s, and their techniques have not really changed all that much), and its Affinity kinda-equivalent is missing some little thing.
For me, just looking at the changes, V2 isn't terribly compelling. There are things I was doing ages ago in Illustrator that don't seem to be in Designer v2, like vector pattern swatches. Once you really get going with it, the absence of features or rough edges (see post in this thread about dashed borders) will leave you frustrated.
All that said, good on them for creating this affordable software, with no subscription.
Illustrator is the undefeated champ, and I've loved it deeply since 1987. You're right that nothing can replace it at the high-end. For that audience, a $20/month subscription for Illustrator or an all-apps subscription is a given.
Still, this Affinity upgrade is an insta-upgrade for me. On a practical level, I'm lucky enough to be able to "vote with my dollars" to support small developers and non-subscription software. From a creative perspective, sometimes it's helpful (or just fun!) to work with different tools.
https://youtu.be/j56s46e97Lo?t=48