>>1
The GIMP has the worst piece of shit of an interface ever, and sub-par tools.
I like Paint Shop Pro 9 or higher. It has 90% of the features of Photoshop at 10% of the price (pulling numbers out of my ass, but you know what I mean), and it nicely combines simple vector drawing with raster image editing, so it's better than Photoshop for many cases. Its interface is also better than Photoshop's, in that it can be minimalized and used more efficiently, and the terminology it uses is more geek-friendly (Photoshop is too artist/fag-friendly; sometimes I'm like WTF is that, then it turned to be a pretty simple concept of raster images.) However, I haven't used a recent version of Photoshop; this comes from a comparison I did some time ago. You should try it.