When I was looking for a new drawing program, having used several versions of AI and hating it, Expression 3 until MS bought and sat on it for over a year and a half (and then removing most of the cool features and charging a fortune), I bought both Xara and DrawPlus around the same time. I'd go back and forth using one then the other. What I really liked about DP initially was the brush strokes, which were very similar to Expression 3 and the style gallery. What really bothered me about DP was the lack of customization, no toolbar creation, few shortcut keys, stability issues, a very inflexible UI.

I started using Xara more and more. I miss not having the skeletal brush strokes of DP and E3 but Xara is a great program with many innovative features and great speed. But the galleries are crude. In DP and Photoshop I can have over 12 galleries open at the same time and using the same screen space as 1 or 2 Xara galleries. Layouts are consistent and don't overlay the drawing area. You don't have to continually resize the galleries, and the pallet well is not constantly changing widths. And a lot less scrolling to locate elements.

The clipart gallery is currently a repository of third party graphics. I have a 21 inch monitor and 4/5ths of the screen is taken up with categories before even a single item is displayed. It could be so much better. Having a dropdown list of categories frees up huge amounts of screen real estate. Allowing drag and drop of objects from the drawing area to the gallery facilitates easy reuse of drawing elements: buttons, separators, backgrounds, logos, headers, surface textures, etc. making it so much more powerful. Allowing the creation of user categories streamlines organization and workflow. Most of the same issues exist with the Fill Gallery.

Tabbed interface elements, dropdown lists and menu trees are used everywhere in software not because people are trying to copy cat each other, but because they are proven useful tools for conserving screen space, organization and getting things done. Icons (with tool tips) as opposed to named push buttons , are used everywhere because your brain can process them much faster than having to read the text on a button, especially where there are a lot of icons to choose from. Industry Standards make sense in a lot of instances, but certainly not all (the Space Bar in Xara for switching between tools makes much more sense than the standard of the push tool, when you have a 3 or more button mouse). Not everything needs to be unique.

I want my designs and art to be innovative. I want my tools to powerful and efficient. If program X has a better idea on how to setup the workspace, use it. Save the innovations for speedy drawing algorithms, memory usage, bitmap manipulations, Boolean operations, color control, printer output, export, vector handling, etc, the main focus of the application.