I worked my way through high school and early college as a graphic artist for a small studio working entirely in Photoshop, starting with version ~3.0, I think, and ending around the time of the "CS" changeover.<p>The basic operation of the toolset in Photoshop did not change under my hand basically that entire time, with additions to the tools increasing productivity only marginally. The major boost came from the speed of HDD's and CPU's allowing for larger images to load and be worked on quicker- NOT some wholesale improvement of the tools to manipulate the images.<p>It turns out, for a large amount of work when dealing with graphics, images, photos, etc... what you need is cropping, movining, selection with feathering and growing of selection pool, cut/copy/paste with layering and transparency, basic shifting of the color via hue and saturation, and tools to edit selective color ranges. That covers 95% of use in the 1990's and it actually still does today.<p>I still have a copy of CS4 for windows that I move from machine to machine and have done so for more than a decade. But for quick things on my M1 Mac where I no longer have Photoshop, I default to Photopea, which cloned the early Photoshop experience nearly 1:1.<p>I think this says a lot about how important is it to get right the user interface mapping to the toolset (and vice versa), and how the two go hand-in-hand in the creation of great power-user software.