The team that delivered GIMP 3 deserve congratulations and thanks for a great upgrade. These aspects among others are really stellar:

Non-destructive filters. Being able to stack editable filters on a single layer non-destructively is genius. It opens up a lot of flexibility, and enables creative combinations that are (much) more difficult to achieve in other image editing software (looking at you PS).

Enhanced API. I've been porting my 2.10.x plugins to GIMP 3 and learning a lot about Python and plugins. The work the API team have done to standardise and expand the API is remarkable. I haven't found any showstopping issues - in fact I think I only found one issue that is easy to work around.

Plugin registration. Requiring plugins to live in discrete folders is a real advantage to developers like me. At first I thought it was just an extra hoop to jump through. But now that I'm including assets and translations that require their own subfolders, I see that each plugin having it's own folder that GIMP recognises and understands makes developer's lives a bit easier.

There are other enhancements that deserve praise also. It took a long time to birth GIMP 3. It was worth the wait.

Excellent work, you GIMP team members!

Ditto! Glad it is even more friendly to developers

kudos to the volunteer team!