The UI was pretty bad before, it took forever to get people to understand what was going on. Now it's just a few tips and tricks and people are off and running. They did a great job.

Just want to chime in that a Krita developer has been working on a complete text tool overhaul from the ground up for the past 5 years or so, and it is just about ready to be pushed into the beta versions, so that pain point should be resolved soon, thankfully.

I can’t speak for Krita - I’ve not used it. But as someone who has designed a lot of software I agree with you fully here. Making software intuitive is the hardest and also most important part of my job. When I test with users the first time it soon becomes clear how stuff that me and my team thought made sense is totally opaque to the end users or just doesn’t fit into the real world workflow. It’s all well and good expecting users to learn the software - there has to be an element of that - but if you force thought, cause confusion or waste time every time you do that you add friction to the product. That friction ruins the users experience of the product and can ruin productivity.

There is a balance to be made, complexity where it allows for power is fine, if you have dedicated frequent users. E.g. my favourite editor is Vim - very complicated and (initially) opaque but also extremely powerful and logical once you know it. But complexity that adds no power or complexity in software where you don’t expect users to be using the software frequently enough to be expert in it is not ok.

It may take longer to learn how to do a task with a less polished interface, but if you're using software "pretty regularly", then most of your time will be spent doing rather than learning the basic functionality.