Quark seems to be run by scatter-brained half-wits that insist on shooting themselves in the feet.

Do you use Quark?

I have, I think, three versions.  Perpetual licenses, supposedly.  When I bought the second version, I had to setup a new account because they changed their system and didn't migrate accounts or something.  Now, they've done it again and, from what I've read, there's no access to prior versions in the new accounts, so you have to contact support for anything related to older accounts/versions.

The versions I have did not have features like Mail Merge.  InDesign has mail merge built-in.  Affinity finally added it as well after a lot of demand.  But, with Quark, mail merge was provided through a third party plugin that cost about as much as Quark itself.  Maybe they changed that now; I don't know.  I got off the Quark merry-go-round.

There were also reports of people having issues activating older versions.

With the last version I bought, you had a perpetual license, but you had to verify the license every 7 days or something.  Imagine needing to get work done for a client, and your seven days are up and you are somewhere without Internet or there is an Internet outage or whatever.  Tough luck for you, even though you paid for a perpetual license.

So, yeah, no.  Quark had a chance when Adobe went to subscriptions, but they continually shoot themselves in the foot.  Again and again and again.

Anyway, I am kind of waiting on Scribus 1.8 which sounds like it will maybe finally possibly catch-up with other page layout software offerings in terms of UI and usability.

Used to use it back in the 3.32 era (still have it in its box), when it cost the equivalent of US$2700 today.

Yeah, that's always a problem with companies that do online activation. I just noped out of a trial of a new version of one of my coding apps, and it broke the licence of my existing install, and the licencing servers for that version aren't running any more.

i had to recover the preferences file from a backup to get my licence working again.

Oh I know, but against a Canva who'll give us exactly the quality we paid for, and a Serif who've F^%#ed us with broken software before taking their golden parachutes, ARE they much worse?

I'm hoping (having never really seen it) they'll have tear-off palettes etc... If Krita can do it, I can't see why other Opensource content apps don't.

I'm going to say yes.

Serif was disappointing but, before the Canva purchase, there was cause for some optimism.

And now, with Canva, there are a lot of unknowns.

With Quark though, I think they've proven themselves to be unreliable.  I don't mean necessarily that the software is unreliable, but that the company and its direction(s) aren't something you can depend on.