I’m going to take the bait:

I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. GIMP is the perfect example of that and generally speaking UI/UX is the main symptom.

Blender was able to move forward by not listening to the FOSS crowd but to the industry. And see where are they now compared to GIMP.

I love that GIMP exists but... I have to say, it never got rid of the "backend developer doing frontend" feeling, and I've been aware of Gimp for 20 years now (did not know how to...ehem, run photoshop in my teens)

Do you have your special dark mode glasses on?

Because I fail to see all the comments here as negative and unfounded. (and my guess why there is often negativity towards GIMP, is because it was too often advertised as a adequate Photoshop replacement, which it is not, so people got disappointed with it)

… and the sizes of their updates are usually impressive! Seems to be a big project that is managed well to keep a good pace and keep the community in the loop. (Although I don’t know much about their inner workings.)

It's a great piece of software. Best feature - not having your colours retrospectively removed from your project [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/rdtodb/adob...

Yes, it is very pleasant to have it around. Especially when you switch to something else.

Furthermore, it's free software. If people have a problem with it, they're free to show up and contribute, or fork if the community is really opposed to their ideas (they probably are for good reason, though).