Comment by asoneth

Similar to software developers, there's a difference between meeting a user need with with established patterns and exploring novel ones.

The vast majority of consumer and enterprise products ought to be done with established design patterns. Figma is fine for this.

Whereas exploratory design is about coming up with novel patterns. Most of this work ends up being interesting but not particularly practical, and even when someone comes up with something great it's often not yet clear how and where it should be applied. In my experience only a few companies actually pull this off and the rest would be better off following existing conventions. Also in my experience, people who do exploratory design have a wider skillset and use a much broader and more flexible set of tools like pen and paper, physical prototypes, 3d modeling, computer graphics, video production, software development, etc.

The challenge has been that many designers are hired for the former but would prefer to do the latter.