One of These Days, Alice!

I have mostly gotten used to using the GIMP instead of Photoshop at home (workflow at work is blazing fast in my paid/licensed copy of photoshop on the workstation at work). I have almost figured out how to do all the things in GIMP that are second nature to me in Photoshop but GIMP does them differently. Mostly I can figure out a reason for the differences in GIMP. But not this one.

This was about to drive me straight up a wall. I wanted to make a composite image from three images, and leave all three images movable/editable separate from each other until I was happy with the overall result. But when I put the third image in the canvas the second would anchor itself. In Photoshop it makes a new layer automatically, and you anchor (merge) the layers when you're damn well ready. GIMP defaults to anchoring the previous images when you paste in a new one. Never mind that you have to copy/paste in GIMP but in Photoshop you can drag/drop from one image to another, we can deal with that. But automatically un-making layers sucks BALLS compared to automatically making a new layer. I dug and dug online and finally found somebody else's unrelated question answered in a way that answered my question. You have to paste the new image in, then make a new layer. The pasted image will be anchored to the new layer. This is a counterintuitive "feature" which has been implemented the right way in Photoshop for ever.

WTF, GIMP team? This is one more reason you still lag behind Adobe. That, plus the offensive name.