And about the GGale developers not being open to feature requests, I think it might have something to do with them not being the original developers. Several months ago the ownership changed hands to some asian guys, and looking at their change log, it seems like they might not be interested in adding on to it, instead simply finetuning the existing features.
Yeah, the program was being developed by a company called Tempest, but they were also quite Asian, as evidenced from the old help files (Engrish abounded). You can still see "TEMP" written behind the running guy in the GraghicsGale icon. I never sent any suggestions to the old team, but I know a guy who also registered it, and he got several requested features implemented, despite the language barrier.
I've used several programs, and it's clear to me now that there is no "the best program", only "your best program." I use GraphicsGale because it is cheap (30 bucks), isn't big and bloated with useless features, and is very flexible. You can put your toolbars anywhere, you can assign hotkeys to anything. Frames, layers, palettes, batch processing. I've been wanting to try and possibly buy Pro Motion for years now, $100 is definately in my price range, but I've never taken the time to learn the interface because I'd just rather keep using Gale, which uses MY interface.
My suggestion is to try anything and everything. Somebody out there wrote a program just for you, whether it be Photoshop or MS Paint.