Every time I try to answer this thread, it ends up wayyyy too long. So, I’m going to just write the summary, and if you want me to elaborate on anything, please just ask, I don’t want to write too long needlessly.
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There are plenty of UI/UX threads on this forum, let alone all places with Krita community, like old forum, reddit (earlier, when I was still visiting), IRC, bugzilla etc. In fact, now that this forum exists, most of the time when I work on something, I ask here for feedback or discuss things even before the mockup stage. Also you missed some of our hottest topics back in the day… like two summers ago… when every thread had “UI redesign” mockups
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3D and 2D worlds differ: for example, most competitors to Blender are pretty expensive, while quite a lot of Krita’s competitors are much cheaper or free. PS, which has the fame of being “way too expensive”, is only half the price of cheapest 3D options, usually those with just one purpose (like ZBrush, or Substance Painter). Even if Blender was subscription-based and costed like PS, everyone would praise it for being so cheap with so much functionality. Krita on the other hand has plenty of cheap competition.
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Krita already has plenty of reach. Every month ~4 millions of users open it. Some of them of course cannot really help financially (they are children, or students, or hobbyists, or in economies with unfavourable exchange rates).
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We do have strategies, both marketing-wise and developing features-wise. In the second category, one of the rules we use is that we try to make features as good as possible for already existing users, instead of hoping to get some potential ones (who might be using other programs not because Krita doesn’t have something, but because of multiple other reasons). That’s both fair, considering we are partially funded with donations, and more reliable, because we have contact with those people, for example here. And people already invested in Krita better know the program, so they can better advice on what exactly is missing, and will take more time thinking about all kinds of consequences of implementing it this way or that way.
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Some of the things you write betrays that you haven’t been involved in the community for too long, or maybe haven’t been participating in the feature requests discussions? Because for example you write (paraphrasing) “you need to think about what your target audience is” as if it was a novel concept to us, while there has been plenty of times users’ requests were denied because they were outside of our goal. In fact, there has been some critique that Krita’s goal is too narrow and we should make it more general. For example, we don’t intend to make Krita a photo editing program. We also don’t intend to make it a graphic design program. Therefore, features that are only useful for photo editing or graphic design are very low priority, often they only end up in Krita if a volunteer codes them up (as long as something is useful enough, it can be merged, but paid developers won’t work on something outside of the goal without a good reason) (alternatively, if someone can argue it would be useful for some kind of digital painting as well). That’s one of the reasons of Krita’s success, I think. You can see the goal explicitly said here: Welcome to the Krita 5.0 Manual! — Krita Manual 5.0.0 documentation (it was described together with user long, long time ago, but seems working well - maybe at some point we’ll be able to add pixel art to it, but things like graphic design will probably never be there).
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Recommended read: Developing Features — Krita Manual 5.0.0 documentation (this only touches some aspects of designing new features, of course, but can still be interesting to you).
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I do actually have some things I have trouble with recently in terms of UI/UX design, and I need ideas. Since I had to write it anyway, I created a new thread: How to improve quick editing/use of assistants? .
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People who are able to do UX design well, and understand the developer’s point of view, and consider needs of users with different workflows or different needs that their own, are really valuable. It saves plenty of time if developers have a clear list of things to do. Most of the time we have to sift through all kinds of requests in the wild on our own, talk directly with users, and figure the desired result ourselves. We do have a few go-to people who we just ask when in doubt - in my case, I usually ask David Ravoy who is good at for example prioritizing features and seeing whether something is worth it if it requires a lot of work (comes from experience, David helps Krita with feature design for over a decade now). I would not mind at all having another person who can quickly and easily communicate things I need to know as a dev. Someone who can understand constraints and limits, who can identify pain points in the current or initial design or workflow, and provide alternatives.