Well, Brammy, since you asked, following is my full story, and why I chose to upgrade to Photoshop CC 2019, instead of to Affinity Photo:
As the deadline slowly arrived for CS6's demise, I began looking at other options, because like many others, I did not want to become another victim of greedy Adobe's annual subscription model. Why else would I cling to CS6 for the past six years?
There were only three possible contenders:
1. GIMP
2. Pixelmator Pro
3. Affinity Photo.
I am sold out on using Photoshop-compatible plugins, so GIMP was dropped from my list early on.
Pixelmator Pro didn't last long either. Even though it is rather cheap compared to Photoshop, the combination of a dark UI with a tiny application font -- which I can hardly read at my age -- not to mention no support for Photoshop plugins, as I recall, finally made me decide to drop it.
That left Affinity Photo. As I told some folks over on the Affinity Photo support forum some time ago, it is indeed a nice, slick-looking program. However, the thing is, I have been a Photoshop user for many years now, since Photoshop 5.5 -- not CS5 -- when it was still delivered via CDs. Thus, I am obviously very used to Photoshop's layout and workflow. Affinity Photo's layout is quite different and takes time to get used to.
Please note that I did make an effort to learn Affinity's setup/layout and work routine using the trial app, and I did in fact learn how to perform some tasks. However, I realized that it would take me months to master it to the same level as I do with Photoshop. To be honest, I don't have that kind of time on my hands. I use Photoshop every day in the work that I do, so there was no time for a long learning period.
But the straw which really broke the camel's back in my case was when I realized that NONE of my current Photoshop plugins work well -- if at all -- with Affinity Photo. NONE of them. These are standard Photoshop plugins which have been around for many years, and which I use daily in my graphics work, so I obviously depend on them a lot.
Well, I discussed this issue at length with folks over at the Serif support forum, and they basically blamed the plugin developers for not making their plugins compatible with Affinity Photo. But the thing is, said plugin developers are unable to do that, because as Serif openly admitted to me in their forum, they have not fully implemented Adobe's plugin API in Affinity Photo. That being the case, how can Adobe plugin developers make their plugins fully compatible with Affinity Photo? They can't. Besides that, they would rather devote their time and energy to improving and updating their plugins for the company that earns them the most money, and that is undoubtedly Adobe.
In fact, from the signals they were sending me over at the Serif support forum, the impression I got was that they have no real intentions of implementing the full Adobe plugin API in Affinity Photo at any time. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that a while back, I was reading on their forum that they are in the process of writing their own proprietary plugin API for Affinity Photo. That is obviously their choice, but I don't think it is very smart business sense to simply ignore the huge number of graphic artists who use Photoshop-compatible plugins. It is obviously a very big market.
But even if Serif is developing their own plugin system, what are web developers supposed to do in the meantime? Like me, they need their plugins working now, and not months or years from now when Serif completes their plugin system, and when there are actually plugins which will work with it, which fulfill the same functions as the current Photoshop-compatible plugins.
At any rate, the folks over there came off as being a bit defensive, in my view, which is natural I suppose, since they are their to push their product, and not someone else's product. So, I finally just stopped posting in their forum.
The simple truth is that I have too much time and money invested in Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop-compatible plugins, to now just suddenly abandon it all. Plus, as I stated earlier, I am very comfortable with using Photoshop. I have my workflow. So, I am just going to stick to what I already know. Likewise, in my opinion, despite its outrageous price, and hated subscription model, Adobe Photoshop still remains the best in its class.