Maybe their social media presence, and customer support will improve now.

I had a similar experience. I tested the pre-release version of Sketch, and I even supported the communities growth as an Admin on Team Sketch back when it was on Slack. But the performance, and kludgy API resulting in plugins breaking with every version update made me look around. Now with Figma it's a universally accessible platform. It just makes sense to spend my money with them.

You can save any Figma file offline. I've heard that they are developing working offline, but I have no clue when it's planned. And with the Figma API no file is "locked in". You can extract anything within your document to anywhere with a little effort.

It's already being done. Hadron, Framer, Phase, etc. In reality this has been tried for so many years that I'm getting tired of the attempts to "visually code". I want the ability to interface my design tool with code, but not be limited by the restraints of code. I personally love Figma for that flexibility within it's API. I imagine just as Photoshop still is used that all tools will continue to grow, and expand with an ever growing market -- each has it's place.

Good read. Flexibility is definitely a balance.

I do think some good points are made. But the points are lost in the final version that is actually worse.

Inventive for sure. Not readable at all. But it does seem to be a WIP (based on the top...um row in the spreadsheet).

A good designer is more than simply age. It's general wisdom, and patience. The ability to communicate, and more importantly listen. As the author says these traits are present at any age, but in general come with time. I'd include an additional point, that with the world's demographic is shifting to 40+ years of age (really older), it's more important than ever to really put a concerted effort into understanding, and catering to the older generations. I've known quite a few agencies that have hired designers over 50 to achieve that perspective. The world isn't young, but varied. Companies should start realizing this, or risk losing grasp of their world presence.

Try using Figma to build a component for a button with horizontally centered icon & text inside of it. This shouldn't be an issue in 2019, but here we are.

I do think stacks are great. But I can do that fairly easily in Figma with grids and constraints.

That sounds amazing, and I would love to do the same, but unfortunately, that seems like a luxury only afforded to big companies with virtually unlimited resources. I'm having a hard time imagining smaller companies being able to dedicate the necessary engineer and designer resources required for building this out.

Very true. That’s the nice thing about Figma. It’s much more incremental. I’ve started with color, and text being defined by Figma. And the advantage with Figma is that you aren’t locked into any single ecosystem that could go the path of jQuery. And designers don’t all have to no how to work with code to modify parts of the system.

Read data in Sketch

This has always been possible with plugins.

Stacks in Framer X

Still don't see this as that much of a benefit, and you are locked into a technical approach of designing instead of freeform. I don't really understand the love of Stacks. Sketch had similar functionality in plugin form, and the larger benefit of the feature is similar to dynamic grids.

Figma did release exclusive features recently (e.g. API, dynamic grids,...) but ultimately those didn't materialize in significant benefits in daily use

I can tell you that a number of organizations are using the Figma API to build rapid prototyping with React. Saw some great demos at a conference.