Yeah, using gimp generally slows me down. It's probably personal, and it might be more stable than last time i used it regularly (several years ago. my assignments require subscribing to adobe CS so i might aswell use those), but i've always found it to be a bit unwieldy.
Alt-tabing between windows sounds really painful

Kind of the equivalent to flipping through a block of drawings, but with less precision.
The NESST/AE combo is pretty good at this. I got NESST on the left, AE on the right. I see the cycle looping in AE, i see what's wrong/what could be better, while i edit. I change a few pixels, press export, and see the difference live, since AE constantly polls for updates to included images. So it's only guess-work the before the first export. The time domain is AE:s strong card, even though PS has gotten quite competent in that respect, too.
One thing that would improve PS considerably would be if there was an indexed colour mode which permitted layers (just ignore blending/layer fx and it'd be fine).
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Also it can load and save GIFs without hassle.
This is a major sell point for me. It would help sharing animated drafts with collaborators at a quick pace.
How do you aseprite users deal with tiles? Say for instance that the animation code will not update the two upper tiles but the two lower in a 4x4 metasprite. Do you just envision that and count grid lengths?