for me the biggest hurdle was getting used to the ui, adobe is definitely the best with ease of use and layout, but so far ive found the feature set to be solid for photo editing and quick gfx work, i definitely miss camera raw and some of the non destructive editing features but gimp has gotten a lot better over the last couple years, especially on the current beta as theyre getting close to the 3.0 launch. definitely not the best choice for everyone but i think it has its niche