I see Blender as a very long running project that got "close enough" to market desires to get industry to see the potential in it and support it. Once the great UI war resulted in 2.8 it has been going great from there.
If you could get krita/gimp/whatever "close enough" to market for industry to "see the potential" then maybe similar could happen.
Although, for all I know, there is a dark side to the Blender current ways of doing things. But for now it seems fantastic.
Blender is unique in the way thet they were not only in the business of developing software, but also creating a film using it. Each of film they produced had certain focus to it, so my understanding is that development process was designed to meet these requirements, and they implemented them in the way artists can use it. (And they perhaps have had very close feedback loop as well.)
It also helped 3DCG is relatively niche, at least not the type of a tool that people would expect to be able to use it without learning it considerably. At the same time Blender did make some compromises around the 2.8 version to adopt to more of industry standard UI interactions as opposed to sticking with the their own way of doing
If you could get krita/gimp/whatever "close enough" to market for industry to "see the potential" then maybe similar could happen.
Although, for all I know, there is a dark side to the Blender current ways of doing things. But for now it seems fantastic.