adobe programs. So the overwhelming majority of designers already developed a feel for doing things the Adobe way.
No. Illustrator is a major player, but not in so monopolistic a position as e.g. Photoshop. Freehand, CorelDraw, Canvas, Xara and others are some real competition with lots of faithful fans, and they are very different.
open source product. The reality is that most graphic artist are stressed out and the least, they want to do is to frustrate themselves with some exotic program.
And yet new apps appear all the time.
Open source developers a bit like people who speak a tone language (Chinese, Japanese) and want to learn English. They can tell you how hard it is for them. But they have no choice but to learn it if they want to communicate with the rest of the world.
Nope. You got it all wrong, sorry. We're not speaking a different language nor learning yours. We're just _inventing_ a new language as we go, and we want to reuse the best things from other languages in it, as well as apply our own ideas. We do this because we like inventing languages, and because we clearly see that the existing languages are not ideal. If we do our job really well, more and more people will start speaking our language.
No one wins over the competition by being a copy. The only way to win is to be better.