Hi Nik,
My thought is that the scaling of the sliders is opposite to what is really needed with some of the sliders.
The ‘gear-down’ function is, I think, unique to Raw Power, so difficult to compare, but perhaps that look at Photos as an example.
In Photos, the normal scale gives a short range of adjustment (-1.0 to 0.0 to 1.0 with 0.01 increments), so a certain amount of movement gives a modest amount of change to the image. If you need a more aggressive change to the image, then you can hold down Option to increase the scale to -2.0 to 0.0 to 2.0 in 0.01 increments, so the same about of movement on the slider gives double the effect. But it means the default is the more controllable scale.
There is a similar function in Pixelmator Photo too, which works similarly to the one in Photos.
In Raw Power this seems to be a different philosophy, so you have to ‘gear down’ to get the greater control over the amount of adjustment.
It just seems very tricky, especially on an iPad, to get fine enough control without using ‘gear down’. This is most noticeable in the Saturation and Vibrancy slider, where I find it’s most common to be trying be using the 0.0x levels on the scale if I don’t use ‘gear down’ I’m fiddling about back and forth trying to find the right spot.
Hope that helps.
Andy