I've been using Painter since around 2000, back before corel owned it. I feel that Painter has lost its way and no longer has a identity or aim of what it ultimately is suppose to be. Its suppose to be the premiere software for artists, yet the devs insist on adding things that do little for artists yet more for people who do art casually and want to try random stuff. Audio brushes? AI painting? How on earth does that even fit with the painter theme? Time and resources could of spent on adding things that matter. How about I don't know...something simple like recent documents prioritizing themselves by the last time they were opened? The ability to copy and paste multiple layers at once. How about being able to rotate the reference window? How about adding gpu support for all brushes instead of trying to milk them by adding them each painter revision? I can't even imagine what random feature they will add in painter 2022.
there're some artrage news promised for this year and clip studio also skipped their summer update slot while already mentioning their autumn release plans, we'll have a glimpse of features corel will be ripping off for painter 2022 really soon :')
one thing I def hate about painters iterations is that advertized major features (i.e. glazing brushes, gpu optimiser, or thick paint which woke up from a 3 years long slumber after artrage added impasto in the custom brush tool) typically take 2-3 releases to get into workable, somewhat stable state,
while the inane AI crap no one cares for that they borrow from corel photopaint team works from the get go