You've never heard of Adobe Premiere, Kdenlive, Apple Final Cut, Apple Logic, Audacity, Cubase, Ardour, Blender? That's OK. Now you haveUsing the examples of video editing packages is rather disingenuous as they are all project based programs that work on the expectation of combining multiple files and outputting in a different format. A very different case.
Not so different:Imagine that you have a jpg image and you want to add a png layer to it then in which format the GIMP must "save" the work.....yeah xcf. So I really think xcf shall be the default "save" option, now when you speak of "save as" things became philosophycal in which definition of what save as means is primordial. So to avoid all of this the export way is OK.
What became annoying here is that GIMP means GNU IMAGE Manipulation Program, not GNU XCF Manipulation Program. So the only annoying thing that remains is the name, but I think for historical reasons it shouldn´t be changed. As for programs that work on intermediate formats, I think every other program do this, even photoshop (remember psd).Care to give any examples of the genre of image editing programs that insist on defaulting to working on intermediate formats ?
Sometimes it´s better to accept a program´s user has gone wrong and accept the correct workflow that allows more productivity and less mistakes. I speak for myself here, since I was a detractor of this way of save/export and now I can live better thank to this kind of workflow.Sometimes it's better to accept a program's development has gone wrong and return it to a more acceptable workflow that matches the expectations of it's users.
Paul Holman www.colourprofiles.com _______________________________________________