Need an incentive to continue Photoshop subscription.

   Thanks for  advices guys.  I am not a photographer but I do work with and create images a lot. I am a game artist.  Blender is my favorite  3d tool  actually and I appreciate a lot free Fusion and Natron options.  My main tool to work with images is Substance Designer currently so I am well aware of all advantages node approach gives.  

   But to be honest any node based soft lacks that feeling of a brush in your hand and a canvas surface right beneath your fingerprints.  You have to put a node after node while in regular  image soft it's just a swift hotkeys you push subconsciously like a piano player.       Brushes are usually terrible.  Tools are focused on video compositing and FX , not art creating/hand painting  and once you need something special you have to construct your own tools yourself.    And they never really turn  truly convenient up to PS level  or you get something slow as hell.  All those nodes easily turn into even more indecipherable mess, a Gordian knot you can't read in your own files till you start to waste your time documenting each part of the graph.

   In a word I would keep nodes for special tasks   and  continue to do my work in PS if I can.   But I can't . I need a proper depth channel support.   Content aware fill is so cool but 100% useless since I need it working in sync on rgb image and depth image together.  With the patch tool I could use actions at least ( also a tremendous pain in the ...) but not with content aware .

   Wonder what Adobe is going to do with a trend Apple set by the depth info recorded by iphone.  I bet it's soon be an integral part of every photo.   

   Years ago my favorite image soft was Painter.  It had the integrated depth channel from ancient times. Crazy thing is  you can't even export it from there without obscure Blender addon one guy did  and can't do anything useful beyond  impasto effects.   

    I love 3d coat, use it from its very beginning.  Even it's brush system is more advanced than Photoshop one since you can use many different brush dabs alternatively within same stroke and a proper separate dub for each material channel .

    There is one huge problem although. Same as in Substance Painter and Mari.

You can't brush paint and at the same time re-compose anything.  Can't move a layer/object around. Re-scale one single object non destructively, adjust the height up and down easily.    All 3 programs are focused toward making  textures for unique object unwrap and it's ok there.  You usually don't need to move anything on a leg or a face of a character.

    But what if it's a scene background , any environment art in general.  Those programs are getting instantly useless.  Would love we had something like Substance Painter or 3d coat being more like a traditional vector editor  with ever editable  vector brush strokes and bitmap filled vector shapes blending to  each other through Z depth combine.

  Alternatives are Nuke and Fusion  but here we are again , a space shuttle we are going to hit a nail with.   While I would just prefer something like Corel Painter where I  could do something really useful with depth channel, where brushes could be depth aware  and could be painting only in crevices for example or within certain depth  and where I could populate an image with thousands  3d tree renders planted in a ground properly  and intersecting each other according to its depth info without gazillion masks to adjust.  Something like what modern game engines  can do within its frame buffer and a speed of light.

   I hoped project Felix could be something like that.  Is it?  Maybe I missed something? I got an impression it's only good for compositing teapots from 3d max.