I bought the Affinity suite, and find Photo a pretty good substitute for Photoshop. The support forums for Affinity products have often raised the issue of a DAM, but there doesn’t seem any interest in making one. I tried Neofinder and settled on using Photos as a DAM.
I have now gone back to subscribing to LR, because of the sheer ease of local adjustments. If I was good enough in Photo (or PS for that matter) I could make masks and apply adjustments through them, but LR does all this for me automatically, letting me add whichever adjustments I want, where I want them without much effort at all. I’m pretty sure the folks at Affinity are clever enough to duplicate this, but I suspect there may be patents held by Adobe that would not let them do so.
I guess ease depends at least in part upon familiarity. You can do local adjustments within the Develop persona of Affinity Photo using the overlay panel. Admittedly not that obvious to folks familiar with how Lightroom operates.
I much prefer Adobe’s offerings, but mostly for the short-sighted stance that I don’t want to have to learn to be as productive using Affinity apps. But… Designer is missing some handy features from Illustrator. Photos is missing some important features like Smart Objects. And Publisher is so far from being even a competing product to InDesign that it’s barely worth launching.
That being said, I have used Publisher, Designer and Photo to create print products in CMYK, spot color and yes, even one with a diecut. No problems at all with production of the final product. The only problem was what it took me to get it there (much more time than it would have using the more familiar to me Adobe products).
The reality here is that Canva IS going to put the hurt on Adobe with this acquisition. And many sites are underestimating Canva’s use. It’s everywhere. Non-profits have nearly standardized on it from what I can see, and education is leaning toward it more and more. Small businesses who can’t afford professional graphic designers are also jumping on the Canva bandwagon.
Since all of these groups aren’t deeply invested in Adobe’s ecosphere, the Affinity apps are going to create a new breed of “designers” who can offer the same results for less money (both in the cost of the apps, and the designer they don’t need to hire—don’t get me started on that subject, though).
The bottom line is that a tool in the hands of an experienced and/or motivated user is going to yield great results—with or without Adobe’s name on it.
I’ve did several personal book projects with Publisher because they weren’t time dependent and I wanted to give it a try. It took way longer than it would have with InDesign (based purely on past experience) but the books were fine. It was a frustrating process; the way they work are sufficiently similar as to make it somewhat familiar but sufficiently different to be annoying.
I don’t use Designer at all and I find Affinity Photo fine for very basic edits (levels/curves/sharpening) but most of what I do is Capture One/Photoshop and time constraints keep me from going deeper in Photo.
I’ve just opened an account with Canva. To be honest I had no idea how big it was.
If you have a lot of experience with Adobe tools, I agree that it can be surprisingly frustrating to try to work with tools from Affinity or other vendors. I slowly have been moving more of my personal work to Affinity tools, though.
It’s like being right-handed and trying to write a note or play guitar left-handed; you know all the basic ideas and can do some things, but it takes far longer and is much more painful to do even the basics.
(For the record, I still get annoyed when I open up Adobe Illustrator and realize that it is not Aldus FreeHand. 
)
European user here… I have been doing all my design for print (CMYK) with Affinity Designer/Publisher for several years now and not run into any issues. We generally deliver everything in standardised PDF/X formats and the results are as expected; no complaints.
My background is in magazine and advertising publishing. My resume includes what was the number 2 and number 4 largest paid US circulation magazines at the time. I also spent a few years with a major print post production house. All these companies that survived, as well as their competitors, used, and still use Adobe.
And pick up a box or a standard packaged or packaging product, or a medication, and it’s highly likely they used Adobe stuff as well. After all these years Adobe still reigns supreme.
What a perfect way to describe using Affinity products when you’re an Adobe user. I feel the same way.
For me, I could easily 100% replace Illustrator with Affinity Designer. Affinity Photo is quite nice, and I could probably replace 70-80% of what I do in Photoshop with it. Affinity Publisher, on the other hand, is so far off from the capabilities in Adobe InDesign that it’s almost laughable to consider even attempting to use it for any serious work.
But then there’s the missing Acrobat and Bridge apps that Affinity has no substitute for. Then, when you look beyond the apps. I use a LOT of Adobe’s fonts, and Firefly is quite a nice generative AI tool that I’m using more and more.
Much like Apple and Microsoft, Adobe has built quite an ecosystem around their apps to keep you locked in. Ultimately, I’ll use whatever tool I need to in order to get the job done… but for the last 35 years (and the foreseeable future) that means using Adobe products.