My understanding is the old Photoshop was pretty bad. I went through a phase of being a student of file formats and the PSD format is practically a case study in how not to do it. (By my metrics, PDF was excellent for its time; they've been able to cram so much crazy stuff into PDF because the foundation is good)
When I first used it on a Mac circa '95 or '96, it felt like a legacy product when I was using it for web work because the color management features intended for print meant it would always screw the colors up if you output for the web [1] if you didn't disable color management, whereas the GIMP 'just worked' because it didn't color manage. [2]
To play devil's advocate, the old Photoshop was a huge lump sum which meant you'd buy one version and then go six years without updating it. The new one is more accessible to people. Also, I find the A.I. features in Photoshop pretty useful, it is easier than ever to zap things out of images: it took just seconds to disappear a cable in [3] for which the older tools didn't work so well. For [4] it removed a splotch and later I had it add a row of bricks to the bottom to improve the visual balance of the image.
Note people sure complained about Office in the '95 era, see [5]
[1] sRGB was new!
[2] Funny I do a lot of work for print now, some of which pushes the boundaries of color management, such as making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms
When I first used it on a Mac circa '95 or '96, it felt like a legacy product when I was using it for web work because the color management features intended for print meant it would always screw the colors up if you output for the web [1] if you didn't disable color management, whereas the GIMP 'just worked' because it didn't color manage. [2]
To play devil's advocate, the old Photoshop was a huge lump sum which meant you'd buy one version and then go six years without updating it. The new one is more accessible to people. Also, I find the A.I. features in Photoshop pretty useful, it is easier than ever to zap things out of images: it took just seconds to disappear a cable in [3] for which the older tools didn't work so well. For [4] it removed a splotch and later I had it add a row of bricks to the bottom to improve the visual balance of the image.
Note people sure complained about Office in the '95 era, see [5]
[1] sRGB was new!
[2] Funny I do a lot of work for print now, some of which pushes the boundaries of color management, such as making red-cyan anaglyph stereograms
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social/post/3lh7qqbqra22y
[4] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110607460518784045
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Office-97-Annoyances-Lee-Hudspeth/dp/...