Yes, it was an intentional stab at humour by taking something to an extreme.
I don't know anyone else as quick to criticise software as you!
...but that's partly because I don't accept things like the utterly crap behaviour of 1.x GIMP as acceptable when PSP has been better in every respect for close to 8 years - and very nearly free!
Partly I just wanted to make sure that someone doesn't accidentally end up with 1.x and then be so horrified that they don't even try 2.x (which is easy to see happening, giving that distros haven't caught up with 2.x yet)
The big thing I hate about 1.x GIMP is all the really really stupid "features" of the UI which fly in the face of all the hard work and research done over the years into good UI design and produce something that is a truly unpleasant user experience. It's not so much that it's hard to use - it's that it goes *out of it's way* to be hard to use (and defecates all over the conventions and standard practices of UI design). Apple are still praised for their foresight in encouraging/enforcing that all apps must adhere to common UI standards, and for producing extensive documentation and guidelines (which MS copied in a small way) - yet the GIMP just goes "nah, sod that! Let's do something really different and make sure that our software requires you to learn every paradigm you knew anew".
It's also partly bitterness that *until now* there has been no usable free paint package on linux because all the opensource free graphics apps that had promise were strangled by the GIMP grabbing all the attention and users. It had more features, and the other projects were all small and fragmented, so they died out.
NB: I've been using the GIMP exclusively for about 3 years now, so I speak from bitter experience, and fondly miss my PSP 4 (!), let alone the later versions, which had so very very many things that just don't work properly in the GIMP (like, oh, NOT forcing spacing to 20.0 on every tool - a behaviour whose only justification is (IIRC) that the GIMP code is so bad that it needs to skip 19/20 paint calls otherwise it's too slow to use. Even on my Ghz PC. That's crap.)
