Photoscape, and all that jazz

Now, i know this might sound REALLY bad and stuck up and all, but seriously, all the people i know who are interested in photography and who want to aspire to be media artists are using the really annoying free photo editing programs such as 'Photoscape' and 'Piknik' which in my eyes, are totally rubbish!!

See, i know most of us are all in the credit crunch, and don't really have money spare, which is where these programs come in, but after about 5 photographs they have edited, they all look the same!

I know i'm slightly contradicting myself here, but i actually have downloaded photoscape, because of the whole hype around it, and i was clearly disappointed. I actually found a lot of the activities on there which you could do rather handy, but these were the things such as printing off different types of paper.

I don't own adobe, but i do own paintshop pro, which i do adore. And the people who use this free software are splashing around in their cash, so i don't see why they don't upgrade?!

Reading back on this, i really do sound like an idiot, but i do think that you can only go so far on photoscape and other programs like it, and then you need to upgrade to a more better program.