Krita is awesome now, but it definitely wasn't showing great promise back in its early days. Years and years ago, it was meant to fill in the image-editor hole in the KOffice app suite. Basically, it was trying to be GIMP-but-KDE even though it was doomed to have fewer development resources because GIMP already existed.

I tried to use Krita back in its KOffice days. It felt like a bunch of toolbars slapped together around an a basic image editor, and it was unstable and missing features. Imagine my surprise when it reappeared years later and looked and felt like a completely different program.

Around 2009 (according to Wikipedia) they decided to focus on one particular niche - digital painting, and the goal went from "be GIMP but for KDE" to "be the best digital painting program" and it's been a night and day difference.