That's probably for three reasons:

• some "interesting" UI decision in GIMP
• force of habits
• GIMP is not a replacement for photoshop

Photoshop merges two very different things, editing and drawing. If you do only editing, GIMP is great. If you also do drawing/painting, GIMP is completely subpar, but Krita is fantastic.

There's also other tools of course. But GIMP, by itself, is not close to be a remplacement for all of photoshop.

I felt that when I had to try using Photoshop at work once. Then after 20 minutes I just installed gimp.

I found that the PhotoGIMP patch helps transition from Photoshop to GIMP.

this patch transforms GIMP’s interface by mimicking Photoshop’s layout, reorganizing tools, adjusting canvas settings, and reassigning keyboard shortcuts to match Adobe’s documentation.

Same here. I use Gimp but I don't like the UI at all.

Also the name makes me think of a Gimp suit every fucking time. I know it's an acronym but guys that's a poorly thought-out acronym to use...

Thank you. Im so sick of gimp being the constant recommendation when its UI sucks so much.

Not that ive found any other good options. The one that came close, Affinity, had controls so wack compared to what I'm used to that I gave up when it asked me to log in, again. Which in itself was giving me some real shady vibes.

If you get enough people to move to the clone, that stops being true though. The clone gets to decide the direction from that point onwards.

It's not a copy of adobe's code, it's all new code that's simply implements the same features. So Adobe releasing a new version won't have any effect.