I dream that one day whoever did that incredible transformation to Blender would do the same to Inkscape and Gimp UIs. In one or two versions it went from the past to the future!
Personally, I'd rather have Blender integrate the feature set of Inkscape and Gimp directly - in the same way that Blender makes an awesome video editor today.
I wouldn't be surprised if that comes someday, since there's already super basic painting on UVs, but "real" work tends to require exporting and working in some form of 2d app be it Gimp or Krita or whatever. Having the same level of functionality directly in the UV editor or even directly on the model to help deal with seams would make shit SO MUCH easier.
Yeah my workflow on my last 3d game required 'layers' in the texture so I had to set up that layering in the shader, rough spray the general idea of what I wanted onto the model, export everything, edit the textures in Gimp to make it look good instead of fingerpainty and flatten them.
Also, the way UV editing selection works is rough. If you don't have a face selected in the model, it simply does not show up in the UV. The UV has its own selection. So in order to single out a part of the UV based on a set of faces you need to first select the faces, remember where in the UV map they live, then select the whole model again, then select the UV points again.
Blender, Inkscape, Krita and GIMP are all good software that can compete with paid alternatives, but only Blender was successful at making modern UI that gives you fast comfortable workflow.
