The only real question to have to ask is, can I work with the features that they have now? Things like arrowheads aren't there yet and they don't have a way to auto trace raster images. Plus if you consider that it only costs $50 and it isn't a subscription. Each bump adds tons of things, which is great. They are currently at 1.6 and they won't charge for an upgrade until 2.0.

I bought Designer when it was first released in November 2014 and they've updated it a lot, at no charge since then. While Designer is great, there are still a few things that are missing but the developers are working hard to add in missing features and to fix bugs quickly. You can freely communicate with them on their forum asking questions, making requests, etc. The developers at Serif (the makers of Affinity Designer) are great. For me, Designer is way easier to draw with and manipulate drawings than Illustrator. After Adobe moved to a subscription model, I looked around and tried a few different apps trying to find a replacement for Illustrator. There are many former Freehand users who have since moved over to Affinity Designer. I started using Illustrator a long time ago too and while I used Freehand and CorelDraw, I have always preferred Illustrator. I too highly recommend Affinity Designer (and Affinity Photo too).

Affinity photo christmas sale