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I feel your pain. When I was still gainfully employed, I needed systems that had image analysis and processing capabilities. We had limited budgets, so I convinced my management to let me use open source software. I used ImageJ/Fiji and wrote custom code to process my images. The advantage of open source code was that I could work on some issues at home where I fewer interruptions.

The advantage of open source software was that there is a community of users who help one another. To succeed at this one need both curiosity and patience to do the required debugging. The academic users often had online workshops and shared the code. For me, this was better than closed source software where a user had to wait until a developer implemented the required algorithms. I would test releases and write and share code to analyze problems that interested both my clients and me.