Quite frankly I cant justify forking out several hundreds euros to PS when GIMP is around, at least not for digital painting and standard image processing. Cant say I am impressed with latest PS versions either compared to GIMP. I also dont get the disappointment over GIMP, for me GIMP as Blender are phenomenal open source projects, that offer for free features that people could not dream to own without giving some serious money even in their wildest dreams, unless they pirate the software.
And feel that people tend to be hostile against GIMP with no practical reason. At least where from I am standing GIMP has accomplished awesome goals with such a small dev base. Blender development is bigger and as such it can implement features faster.
Release wise, a new release of GIMP for 2.6 poped out just few weeks ago . Frankly I think the issues is that people dont need new releases of GIMP as badly as they need blender releases, GIMP already works great in many areas and it has only PS for competition, which it offer features that average user does not desperatly need anyway. I cant think of one thing besides a new GUI that I would need from GIMP for the next version, and I cant think of a PS feature the past 10 years that I needed in GIMP as much I needed NGONs or better sculpting tools in blender.
Of course everyone millage may vary, but with the hostility GIMP are getting (anyone remember that GIMP dev call for volunteers that received all that hate here ?) I cant blame GIMP for any lack of feature. Its not a planning issue its politeness issue. Saying that blender is far better organised than GIMP is big fat lie and complete disrespect to the hard work of all gimp developers. Making a product that is comparabe to PS is not any less complicate then making a product that competes with Maya and 3ds max.
It pains me to see people disregard all the hard work that people do in their precious free time for any open source project.