Must you make a hard choice between Adobe, Corel, Xara, Affinity, etc.

Further...

I tend to use corel paint most of the time for simple photo editing/resising (because it loads faster). I do have a subscription to CC because some people want their files in AI format. I have photoshop, I learned photoshop, it's a complicated program. But I did find it much more powerful than corel paint. It is sometimes slow and resource intensive though. But some of the stitching / panorma tools are amazing. Not to mention better cloning control, patch tool, liquefy, etc. I can't imagine going back to paint for *serious* photo editing (I don't do much anyway). Also, photoshop has script addons that allow you to do mockups very quickly.

And Indesign is generally the pro's choice for layout / publishing. I would only use it now if I was desiging something complex like a book or a magazine. Where the CC subscription comes in handy is when you realise that things like after effects, premiere pro, flash, are all included. At first I thought "all I want is illustrator... just give me illustrator" but I have found it handy to have the CC subscription on top of corel.

But my main tool is corel. I would rather give up photoshop and indesign than lose corel (if I had to). If I was a photo editor or true graphic designer (not the same as an illustrator), probably I wouldn't say that.

In short, I tend to use the best program from each suite. I rarely take the same file and edit it in two separate programs. Each time you do that, you lose time anyway.