‘Without any explanation’ was a bad way to put it (but if you want examples of that, check out the next paragraph). What I mean is that devs use the excuse of ‘a feature being in another program isn’t good enough for us to add it’ way too often, and as a dev myself I get it. There’s a billion people asking for X purely because X is in some other random program/website/tool. They’re probably asking for some barely usable marketing-garbage tool that got shoved down their throat because it had a bunch of buzzwords that made people think the program was ‘so advanced’ just for having it. That’s not what I’m asking for.
I don’t know if you’ve ever scrolled through one of my Krita discussions before, but I spend hours or days of my time sometimes just trying to make a case for something. I don’t just go ‘add this please’, I make videos, screen recordings, direct comparisons with the performance or reliability of other programs, infographics, mock code, possible solutions, deep dives into QT or Krita code myself to try and find the underlying problem, time things down to the ms, record with high speed photography, etc. Keep in mind that linked thread is more of me rambling about extremely deep, inherent problems with the way Krita’s foundation is coded, all the way down to the QT level and isn’t what I’m talking about above with the ‘shooting down’ suggestions.
Here’s a better example of a bug fix or feature example with pictures, artist-friendly explanations, math, deep-dives and direct real-world examples of the ugly output Krita gives and what it should give instead, that got a ‘yeah that sucks’ and then sat dormant because only professional artists would notice this stuff.
My feature requests ended up getting shorter and more jaded because I realized effort in suggestions gets barely anything, and of course got no reply. So if you want an example of a legitimate concern getting no explanation here’s your example.
A more positive example, where I felt the devs actually cared but was absolutely expecting silence when I first posted. Of course if I recall from the MR, it was a handful of lines of code at most and since it was a regression it was logged as a bug. But it felt good as an artist regardless.
Version control and the entire Phabricator MR landing and auditing and approval process is so unbelievably daunting to artists that I don’t know how you expect to get true artist feedback there (unless the artist is they themselves a programmer). Saying that is ‘the best place’ for artist feedback just shows how disconnected the artist-programmer dynamic is in the whole process.
Funny you mention that, because one of the only features I’ve ever successfully got implemented in the probably 3 years now I’ve used Krita, was added when I did exactly that. Right after the original request was almost completely ignored. I still use the feature they added nearly every day, dozens or hundreds of times, and it has saved me an uncountable amount of time and I am eternally grateful.
I think these are good questions I’ve never seen really considered. Which brings me back to the original topic I had brought up, who is Krita for? And not the corporate answer of ‘everyone teehee’, who do you target? There is a target, or Krita would have all manner of random non-art features. Is it a photo editing program? An art program? A meme making program? Ironically enough, I’ve seen features get added which benefit barely anyone, if anyone at all, and all I can think is why? I’m not going to name which ones because I respect any and all work put into the program, but it’s frustrating thinking that the same effort could have been put into something that would benefit wide swaths of entire industries.
But every time I think of some feature that would benefit nearly every artist I know in my field, all I can think is how it’ll just get ignored and I don’t bother. And it’s mainly because a lot of them are a bit more than some small feature.
I dream of a day where I have the funds to personally commission the development of specific features of Krita to benefit everyone.