gimp replacement

gimp 2.8 brings some serious usability regressions, trying to force everyone onto the XCF file format -> http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Save_%2B_export_specification

In my not so humble opinion that's a braindead decision since it very negatively affects anyone who doesn't care about all the extra data in that XCF format but who simply wants to crop a JPG or save a scan as an indexed, space-efficient black-and-white image or do some other one-off image-to-image job. I'd venture to guess that the latter, image-to-image fraction of users VASTLY outnumbers the XCF-professionals. Besides, I can't see how 2.6 inconvenienced the pros so what's the purpose of the change? 2.8 certainly inconceniences the image-to-image people to a great and painful degree.

Anyhow, it looks like the ship has long sailed and I need to stop ranting. The reason I opened this ticket is to get some suggestions for image-manipulation programs that do not make it a point to fight their users like that. I frequently need to crop images and reduce their complexity by transforming them to black and white so as to reduce their size. The images often originate from a digicam or scanner.

 Something that gimp did well is that I could set the threshold value above which a pixel was considered black and below which white. I could even do this differently for different regions. I'd hope there's another program out there that can do this. For the moment, I've recompiled gimp 2.6 for trusty (and published it in https://launchpad.net/~r0lf/+archive/stable) but unless the gimp devs regain their sanity for a future release, I'd like to move off eventually. Hey, who would have ever though up-porting would become necessary? Hehehe.