Painter is an odd program -- in alot of ways very powerful but since Corel got it they have completely mishandled the development of the software and instead of refining and developing the tools for serious artists have instead tried to go after the amateur photographer via the auto-painting of photos... this can be used for interesting results to post process renders but is of little use to serious painters.
The painting engine is still much more sophisticated than anything Photoshop can offer and there are some individual brushes and methods that haven't been beat by any brush engine anywhere that I've seen... other commonly used brushes are hopelessly outdated and need to be purged.
I'm not hopeful that they deal with the issues that need to be dealt with the most -- which is hopelessly out of date tools all over the UI... but regardless getting paint to look like real paint is certainly not in the cards.
In order for (painting) color mixing to be true to life you need to account for various factors:
1) Binder - index of refraction (wet and dry) and attenuation (wet and dry).
2) Pigment - spectral color, size, density, staining, opacity, specific gravity, etc. (and not allow these pigment particles to loose their identity in the mix)
3) Additives - Optical brighteners, fillers, etc.
If this sounds like rendering terminology it's because it is -- using the real-time paint engine of any painting software is technologically CPU/GPU bound in the same way a rendering engine would be... therefor technically difficult even if they were inclined to go in that direction, which I don't see that they are.
Just getting a simple graphite pencil to work properly is beyond the scope of any paint engine out there -- the missing ingredients include:
1) the reflective nature of the graphite (depending on brand and hardness)
2) the SSS and optical brightness of the paper/substrate.
3) the interaction of the paper surface with the graphite particles -- meaning the particles will actually work their way down past the surface and be impossible to erase, erasing the surface damages the paper which effects future applications, and the paper will only hold so much graphite before it rejects future applications.
All of these things are part of why a well executed graphite drawing has much more character than a digital equivalent.
True "realism" in digital painting is decades off and by then it may not even be desirable anymore... the richness and visual properties of true paints are in no danger of being replaced by the computer, but how much that distinction matters to the artist/consumer of art isn't clear to me at this point. It may be that as more and more artists go digital that the relative rareness of traditional media will be coveted and create a demand for better tools for the digital artists -- or it could just as easily be that nobody notices the differences and traditional medium dies an ignominious death as a historical footnote.
I'm far from a luddite but I consider myself to be a traditional media artist before anything else -- my finished product will always be a "real" painting and anything I do in the computer is a tool to give me a better finished product in the real world... because in my estimation the real-world finished product is so much more satisfying to my real-world eyes
I applied several times for the Beta testing for Painter but was passed up for it -- as you can see I have plenty to say on the topic and I'm not sure that mentality would be welcomed by the dev team... I tend to think very big, and that is an expensive point of view.
Best,
Jason.
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