It is worthless, in fact. Because it’s not actionable. Read what the above user said again :

Every time I open gimp to try and get acclimated to it, I close it back out of frustration. Nothing is intuitive in that software. Not even the naming of the tools settings.

Nothing in here is specific enough to do anything about it. Imagine you’re a developer, and you read this. What do you do ?

As users, we may not be able to program stuff, but we can do so much design work. Making mockups takes some time but it’s within our reach. Let’s all contribute to the best of our ability. If all a user can say is “Nothing is intuitive”, then their feedback can only be dismissed. Because it’s not actionable.

I’m not involved with Gimp development, I’ve been watching it from the side, so I can’t tell if there’s an actual lack of contributions related to UX design -but so far I have only seen the public respond with the same sort of vague feedback : “the UI needs work”. Unfortunately that’s as unhelpful as it gets. Spending some time designing interface mockups, or writing up descriptions of how such and such feature should work, now that’s helpful, and is something pretty much any user can do.

I was making a general statement about why foss stuff doesn’t tend to suit glitzy, highly marketable front facing stuff, using gimp as an example

Yea, I believe that’s true. And it is always a resource problem, because with limited resources, developers focus on making the thing work first, look nice second

Dig deeper ?

Homepage text :

The Free & Open Source Image Editor
This is the official website of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).
GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes.
Whether you are a graphic designer, photographer, illustrator, or scientist, GIMP provides you with sophisticated tools to get your job done. You can further enhance your productivity with GIMP thanks to many customization options and 3rd party plugins.

That’s false, not sure why you would say that. Literally just visit the download page

https://krita.org/en/download/

It’s quite the testament that the Blender name is known to the masses (hope you don’t mind me calling you the masses)

Your first problem is you’re using a Mac. But beyond the obvious trolling, Krita excels at painting and is getting better at text as well -so far text tools have left to be desired but they’ve been working on a revamp for some years now, probably coming rather soon. What I find lacking as a daily user (I do illustration in Krita, animation in Blender) is the general image manipulation tools. Transforming, snapping, transform masks… are often either lacking in flexibility or poorly performing. I use Affinity Publisher on the side for compositing my illustrations with text for print or web, I wouldn’t be able to rely on just Krita for that. But for painting, it’s absolutely fantastic -performance wise, usability-wise, the shortcuts are so well thought out it’s a joy to use. It’s really made with painting in mind. If you like using filters, they have a good G’mic integration with hundreds of builtin filters. I can’t comment on their mac builds though, you’d have to try them yourself.

Well, it has solved it in large part, yes. Tablet pen buttons are correctly recognized on Windows at last, GTK3 allows panels to be dockable pretty much anywhere, the interface looks generally sleek.

Now perhaps you could specify what aspect of the UI you find problematic, otherwise it’s hard to respond to such a vague statement. Imagine you’re a developer, and you read a piece of feedback that says “the gimp has a steep UI problem”. Where do you go from there ?

I don’t know man, I think the Photoshop homepage reeks of corpo crap, whereas the Gimp homepage does a good job at cleanly presenting the program in a quick way. Maybe I’m just used to FOSS, or already too allergic to corporate software, but going by the homepage design, my preference is obvious, there’s not even a contest

It is essential that you explain exactly what you find unintuitive, otherwise -forgive me, but- this feedback is worthless. Make a bullet list, with captures, show how you would rename or rearrange things. Do your part !

yea, “freeware” has that suspicious connotation to me as well. The mark of an era

Spongebob Prismaticocylindricalpants doesn’t have the same ring to it

yea, when it really is a batch-pixel-value-changer !

I don’t think the issue is that it implies something negative, it’s that it does a poor job of conveying the nature of open-source, ie free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.