Getting professional results from Gimp

To some extent you are right, you can do a lot on 8 bits, but if the competitor goes 16 bit you better do it too, or people will go for the competitor regardless if they need it or not.

This is especially true if you are new to the market. When was the last time you saw an ad saying something like "Our new product allows you to be almost as productive as if using our main competitor, the only price you have to pay is a couple of months of retraining"

The cost of retraining is often much higher than the licensing costs even for quite expensive apps like Adobe Photoshop, and if the competitor isn't significantly better in all respects it won't be considered.

So, that leaves us with another suggestion for the Gimp team. Make your GUI as Photoshop-like as possible, and make sure that it interoperates well with Photoshop nativive file formats. This is what made Openoffice.org a thinkable alternative to many organizations.