I saw a few of Alchemist videos and had to say it's not my piece of cake. I see same issue I have with SPainter: lots of puzzling sliders I have no idea how they would work internally so getting zero feeling of what to expect from them and which you usually tweak to death and it's still not what you wanted and overall too confusing interface. Too hard to tweak subtle nuances it's often necessary. Not enough of control. Turning into a typical SP "style" you instantly sense once you see an asset.
While in SD it's also not as simple and obvious as it might be without all those exposure and hidden functions but still more controllable.
So I would just want a set of normal vector and pixel brushes, same as in SPainter and better as in Corel Painter which would open you a new true art side of things. Yeah, In SD I feel myself as a robot sometimes.
Surprisingly SD had a few super basic pixel brushes a while ago. I miss them . Another thing is the transform gizmo. SD is a champion in having most inconvenient one ever made. Please look at Affinity Photo where you could scale things around a exactly placed center of transform. Same in Photoshop etc
Would love to be able to pick certain "layers" or parts of the graph with a picker from a screen like in every normal image editor and quickly check them on and off.
ps. Or maybe SD could be just a live filter with nodes and access to layers in Photoshop. Well, since it's same company now