Most of my problems with Xara P&GD are beyond their control (i.e. tethered to the very weak visual C interface, with nonsense back-end updates that break everything due to this stupid MSV140.dll junk).

That said, things that Xara itself did wrong in this release:
Catalog/smart shapes is very workflow killing. Without it in the default flyout and being tied to the internet, what's the point of that? I'm personally sick and tired of everything being 'always on' and 'always downloading/updating'. This is a waste of my resources, personally and the actual menus now, again, are cumbersome and don't flow at all with the existing paradigms they set up the rest of the program to fall under. In other words, it looks like they took a box that holds everything just nice, then duct taped a cell phone to it and called it 'modern connectivity'. Sorry, but it doesn't work for me.

The things I do like that were added were the knew quick photo editing tools, specifically x-filter. I didn't think I'd use it much, by oh my, it works really nicely with photo temperature to get all kinds of nice color edits quickly.

My wishlist:
Get rid of the color plugin selections under effects: I feel these are so generic they should be built in and not external with their own interfaces that don't match what Xara does. In fact, I feel that a lot of the 'generic' things in the plugins effects should be built in and accessible via the regular photo editing tools. How they implement it, could be disasterous based on how their catalog has morphed into something that I don't use at all despite the fact some of the smart shapes are really nice. But that interface...the strongest point of Xara *IS* the interface and workflow and it seems based on my couple of years using it, they don't have anyone with a clear vision adding these tools in, so they all feel like a room of cats that the end user has to herd up. I mean, if I wanted menu after menu of time wasting, I'd just use Illustrator tbh.

So first and foremost, I'd like to see a more unified experience that relies less on on menus and reconstitute the flyouts. The ones that are there are excellent, so there's no reason new features can't be fit into new flyouts. As long as the selections are thoughtful and careful, less *IS* more. Just filling in checkboxes to compete with software that is popular is how to lose focus and get stuck in 'feature creep'. We don't need a lot of this stuff the way it is. We need the stuff that's in there to not feel alien.

So overall, I'm just 'meh' about it all. I still think Xara is the fastest tool to get from idea to finished vectors and has(had, rather...what happened to the old raster tool where you could draw pixels?) decent photo/raster tools, but if they keep down this path, there's going to be absolutely nothing to incentivize following them with upgrades any further, imo. I think this is a huge fallacy of software in general: Knowing when to quit. Upgrades end up being more combersome and hype and 'features' can only get you so far. In the end, once something is perfect, you don't mess it up by going further. I'm sure anyone who uses photoshop would agree with this, since CS4 was the last time anything useful was added, yet every week, there's a 'new upgrade' to that too, which doesn't do anything for the end user except make them wait for the program that should immediately launch have download a gig of useless nonsense. Don't let Xara fall into this...it's painful.