Heya Zach - Thanks for your thoughts!

Great to hear Figma is working on something more Git like. I will switch in a heartbeat if they ship something competitive with Abstract!

The whole industry used Photoshop back in the olden days before Sketch and Illustrator were any good for GUI work. Illustrator specifically had four primary pitfalls:

1. It used to not have per pixel snapping. So whatever vector you did and then had to export into bitmap assets would be reliably blurry around the edges every time.

2. Illustrators render engine did not correctly alias vectors into bitmaps. Bjango did a good blogpost on this where Illustrator was exporting his circles as squircles in bitmap. So you could trust Illustrator to auto-mangle any asset that had alpha. Initially iOS/Android only supported bitmap assets.

3. The layer management system used to not be setup for rapid interface work as it was designed for graphic design vectors in mind only. So on artboards with many elements you had to constantly click through a shit ton of layers to get down to a piece of text or something and interact with it.

4. Photoshop got semi-automated asset export and speccing plugins before Illustrator and they worked more accurately than Illustrator since it had per-pixel snapping for bitmap assets.

Anyway if you had a good enough cheesegrater or PC tower with a chunky GPU, Ps worked fine ok for everyone before stable Sketch 2.0 showed up in 2015

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On onboarding with Abstract; it is a different process so getting designers onboarded that are used to working 'the dropbox standard' way is a challenge. What I am pointing out in this article is that there is a specific way of using Abstract that is so advantageous it makes it worth considering.