It's a pity Apple didn't choose to acquire Affinity when there was a chance. Pixelmator Pro looks like a toy app compared to Logic or Final Cut. I don't see how it could ever catch up to Photoshop. Even at such small scale it's always been very buggy in my experience and development seems to have stalled (apart from some obligatory AI features).
I am glad the standalone purchases are still available and I assume they will stay updated in sync with the subscription-based ones. I would hate my copy of Logic getting slowly obsolete..
Your experience is starkly different than mine. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro’s much more toy-like predecessor from ~10 years ago?
My experience is that while there’s a feature and community gap for both Pixelmator Pro and Affinity, Affinity just tried to copy Photoshop, positioning it as a worse but cheaper Photoshop, while Pixelmator Pro feels like an attempt to make a better photo editor, losing some familiarity points but also being tangibly better than Photoshop at most use cases it can handle, which is many. It’s also an excellent macOS citizen. Between those two factors, it seems much more up Apple’s alley.
Affinity never made mac-assed Mac apps. Pixelmator is more a Mac app than Messages or Music. That's why they bought them instead of Affinity.