P: Gradient editor needs a few improvements

no he is not.
Bennett repeatedly has given you a perfect example of the gradient tool's flaw, and you have repeatedly given "not even remotely close" examples of trying to mimic his examples, and been rude about it..
This means either he is correct, and the tool is simply broken, and you should fix it.
or
your all "encompassing knowledge" of all things graphic design and software implementation has been grossly exaggerated by yourself.

Either way? Bennett is correct.
ps: I used to work on the Amiga too Bennett, loved the damn thing.

Edit: "This topic is no longer open for comments or replies."
First time I've seen that here. There's definitely more room for discussion, such as how the interface can work. I'll respond to Ryan Malm's comment here:
A script could be made that makes a close enough approximation of a "gentle gradient" by using the built in gradient feature with a very large number of stops. I may try to make one.

Original message:
Here's another example with the orange to blue gradient, the Photoshop version has a midpoint with 100% smoothness. (sorry about the small-scale jaggedness)

Here's a 3D plot of the two red-to-cyan gradients.
Chris Cox's in white, Bennett Foddy's in Black. The duller shades are 2d projections.

(I realize perceptual color space isn't a cube, and there are probably profile issues, but this at least lets you see the smoothness of the gradients. There is some banding, of course)

Let me make one other suggestion that can be implemented without making big changes to the UI. You could have a checkbox option that allowed you to select between splines and simple quadratic beziers. Quadratic beziers don't allow you to control the tangent - only the position of the control point - so there would be no difference in the rest of the UI.

If you did this, there would be two differences in functionality when you had the checkbox checked:

1) The gradient wouldn't necessarily pass through all the control points in RGB space (this would presumably be a downside for some usage cases). In other words - the curve approaches a control point but doesn't touch it.

2) You would get a much smoother gradient with less banding and clumping (a big upside for some usage cases)

Since both options have their pluses and minuses, it would be nice to offer both, and all you'd be adding to the UI is a checkbox marked 'bezier' or 'smooth'.

Wow, this embarrassing on Adobe's part. From the original suggestion I knew exactly what was being asked for, exactly why the current gradients in photoshop don't work, and exactly what the fix would be.

Chris: you're being a horrible, defensive ass about all this. Please, please take a breather and ask for someone else to review this matter.

I completely agree with Bennett on this, and have had the same issues creating gradients to my liking without adding a 3rd and 4th color stop in both Photoshop and Illustrator. It'd be nice if some more design/art oriented people weighed in on this, as having the defensive developer responsible for acting being the sole person responding is clearly not going anywhere.

That's why I've kept up the conversation instead of dropping it after your first few posts.
And the "someone" for the investigation and implementation... is me.

OK, now you've given us something we can investigate and work on.

As for "advanced" UIs -- they only make sense when the number of users for the advanced UI is large enough to justify the development, testing, and maintenance cost of the advanced UI. So you either need a large number of potential users, or a relatively simple UI design for the advanced controls.

Ok then, now that you've done that, can you get someone to investigate solutions?

I haven't been rude or defensive. I've been trying to understand your requests, why you don't seem to understand the Photoshop gradient UI, and correct several of your misunderstandings about gradients in Photoshop.