alt Hacker NewsGIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything. There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.
The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!
No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".
GIMP is quintessential example of this.
Do you have examples of bad UX in recent Gimp versions that's not simply "no time to improve it" (still mostly volunteer project)?
I believe Gimp could never enter the professional circles because it's internals are too tied to one, single colour model (RGB).
Professionals in many fields use tools with very bad UI/UX.