Well, first of all, he was dumb, but the kind of dumb that sounded smart, if you know what I mean. And he already screwed the place up by moving them into the direction of all the wrong 3D software he could find, which was a shame to watch. Glad to be gone.
And, alternative softwares are being used. One of them, unfortunately, is Lightroom, which some actually consider a retouching tool, their only one. I have seen it on resumes. Then there are all the push button plug in software tools. You know, push this button and the woman's face is magically smoothed to perfection. Push this button and you have a B&W masterpiece. Push this button and you have Art. Those have been successful, because of the reasonable cost and ease of use, and I guess they will continue to be, because, bottom line, retouchers are expensive, and a lot of modern software is about eliminating labor costs. And, now that Print is near death, those alternatives will be viable since the world is and will be looking at images on their handheld devices instead of paper. Can't see someone investing the enormous amount of capitol and manpower in developing a new photo editing program in that environment. Nope, we're stuck with Photoshop, which, frankly, is a pretty good piece of software, if you ask me. I'm just concerned that it could become neglected, but, so far, so good.
And, btw, comparing Photoshop to some early word processing software is a little insulting. It takes a long time, maybe, well, forever, to master PS. We're not typing memos.