On one hand, I agree that it could cover a lot of ground, but to me the most obvious answer is that texturing refers to texture paint mode, which has been plagued with performance issues for a very long time and is infamous for such. Put another way, I’ve never met an artist who didn’t have issues with Blender’s built in Texture Paint mode. It’s well known to be a pain point. I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s what people would like to see improve.
There are dozens and dozens of feature requests for it on RCS. Debates about multi-texture paint features crop up regularly. Bug reports about texture paint slowing down and freezing blender on large textures are common and are usually closed as known issues/duplicates. Reliable texture painting is the most likely interpretation for the survey results for me; it is clearly a need that blender does not meet and to see it de-prioritized again is disappointing.
Figuring out potential alternate explanations for what survey respondents meant by “texturing” could be useful, but I really want to know what is going to be the next steps from the devs with this info in hand.
Are they going to refine the survey to find out why so many people responded with texturing as their biggest workflow issue? Are they going to adjust priorities? Are they going to ignore it for another year?