I used Blender in the early days. It was fast, quick to use, and intuitive once you learned the controls. It made me wonder why other apps couldn't just use Blender's toolkit.

I also used Gimp around that time. It was already quite old. Despite all the functionality, it felt clunky and I wondered why they couldn't use Photoshop's UX - Adobe had already spent millions figuring it out for them.

My guess is that Blender is an effort by artists who created software to help them, and Gimp is an effort by software engineers who created what they feel is a "good enough" open source alternative.