Graphics software like other art forms have developed over time. Artists and yes animator are artists too. The graphics software we use are developed to do the tasks that are being used at the time that it’s features are designed.
By definition all us artists are always pushing the software to achieve new look artwork. There is another force at work, when the software is produced by a commercial company. Their need is to develop an income stream, therefore traditionally the company produced new versions, with exiting looking update, on a regular basis, say every 18 months. The result is bloated software, which means that the file becomes very large, and takes up large amounts of RAM and disk space. The number of new features and the addition of flashy sounding features drives the customers buying new versions.
Just because modern computers have large amounts of RAM and disk space, there isn’t, any reason for the company to make their software more efficient. This is because personnel are expensive to hire and then the cost of their pay packages. There’s another problem, is that the larger the code is, the more difficult and costly the fault finding and code correction is.
Software produced by a company whose name starts with ‘A’ and have in recent converted to the subscription model, produce software that is bloated, very large, have many features that most users will never use, many of which have never been fully debugged.
In my experience software like Pencil2D are small and nimble and most users use most of the functions. If the user wants to do more complex tasks, these can be done by a series of available steps. If the available steps cannot do what you require, then the user can develop a technique to do the task, we call this a work around. The fact of life, is that the developers can never catch up with the artist, like us require.
Personally I would rather use Pencil2D for my work than use ‘A’ companies Animator program. Yes it doesn’t have flashy features, that look useful but are often full of bugs! I put effort in, when I want to develop my animation techniques, but I would have to do this using the ‘A’ companies software too. I think that development, of Pencil2D, may seem slow but looking at the overall performance I’m happy with the results that I produce.