For me, it’s the feature discovery that’s massively lacking. Last week I wanted to scale the selected area. Had to search for it online. The UX is the least intuitive one of all drawing software I’ve used.

It used to be way worse. I first tried gimp 10ish years ago and instead of the program running from a single window it was like the canvas, the hierarchy tree, and every other toolbox had its own separate window. I think they updated that a while ago now.

I don't know how to specifically tell you that it's really fucking bad other than the fact that I can never figure things out without looking them up because it's really bad and it's not good and that's why I can't

For minor things it works alright. For slightly advanced things, like making making curved text, it's not intuitive compared to Photoshop. Though personally, even for minor things I found Krita more pleasant.

A UI designer made this little short about Gimp, which I think captures the sorta things that can be frustrating.

I'm extremely pleased to hear they will be taking UI seriously.

For me, the biggest thing was the program not running from a single window. IIRC there was actually a separate fork of GIMP that made it run in a single window called GIMPshop or something, and that made it into a single window. I'm not sure when GIMP itself got single window functionality.

It's a lot more usable these days.

I find the UI completely fine. But I think a lot of people expect it to be a perfect and direct clone of photoshop that you don't have to pay for, rather than its own piece of software and are consequently upset when they have to learn how to use it. People forget that they had to learn how to use photoshop as well.

Like you, I've asked people to give a specific example of something that is clearly bad about GIMP and either don't get a proper answer, or they name something from an ancient version.