GPU-based imaging

Sounds like a good idea. The original engine was written for mostly CPU-based processing, and parallel compute has become much more of a thing since then.

They won't be able to do everything on a GPU, but they can optimize the system for GPU compute and have graceful fallback for operations that a GPU can't do.

considers

They might also consider adding distributed support. My understanding is that Photoshop is cloud-based these days. I haven't used Photoshop in decades, never seen the cloud-based product, but if most of the compute happens server-side, I imagine that that's a lot more amenable to selling higher-end services where you loop more hardware in for more compute capability.

That'd be an area where they could legitimately bill cloud-based operation as a plus versus local stuff like Gimp.