I haven't used any of the Affinity apps. But are we talking about the same Photoshop?

> I counted 20 processes running the last time I had PS installed

I don't check how many background processes are running when I use Photoshop because I don't notice them at all. Almost every feature I use in it feels responsive, especially compared to how it used to be. If you're talking about telemetry, yeah, I hate that too, but I've more or less resigned to it as a necessary evil in all my professional tooling.

> The apps all take forever to load

Photoshop opens nearly instantly on my M1 Max Macbook Pro, as it did on my M1. It was slower on Intel, but what wasn't. I can open and close Photoshop three times before Discord even loads an empty window.

> drain battery if working remotely

I've never tried a remote workflow with Photoshop, so can't speak to that at all. Definitely does not seem like what the program is optimized for, and I would think battery drain would be the fault of whatever tool you're using to remote in, no? Or do you mean just working on an unplugged laptop? In which case, I find Electron apps that do one task poorly tend to be less efficient than even heavier desktop apps that 100 things well, Adobe or otherwise.

> and are far more unstable than in the past.

Sorry, what? I haven't had an Adobe app crash on me in probably eight years. I of course count that as good luck, but to say the current builds are less stable than older versions is just … insane to me. Thinking back to, say, the CS2/3 days, half my time in the program was spent Cmd+S-ing for fear of the inevitable hourly crash and loss of work. Photoshop crashes were a legitimate part of creative culture from like 1999 to 2012.

Sorry if I sound like an Adobe shill. We've just clearly had very different experiences with their products of late.

Where we are in agreement is that Blender is cool! I'm too much of a neophyte in 3D workflows to assess whether I think it's ultimately well designed (some bits seem to be … others not so much?), but it seems to run very well on the various machines I've tried it on and I have a great deal of respect for the nature of the program and the people behind it.