I am deep, deep down the Illustrator rabbit hole (20y of it being my main tool, working on big projects that are deeply entwined with how it works) and will not be changing to Affinity Designer, but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists. The subscription model is super off-putting when you’re barely scraping by. Sure Adobe has student pricing but you know what? I wasn’t a student when I glommed onto AI, I was just recently out of school and struggling to get into the animation industry. I pirated it for a while, then started buying it every second or third release when it actually had features that sounded useful to what I was using the program for.

Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft.

I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription.

Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.