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To be fair, photoshop didnt always do this. I still use CS2 and it definetely doesn't work like you describe.

I'd say that GIMP is somewhat comparable to the feature set of CS2, though I admit I havent used gimp much.

Smart Objects were introduced in CS2, so no, :)

Ah you are right. It gives the illusion of quality loss until you commit the change, and then it looks crisp again.