Originally Posted by
Charles Moir
And it turns out that the Feather control, combined with Transparency control, especially graduated transparency gives a faster, easier method than any Mesh tool for creating complex shading and highlighting. And this is why Xara has not, and is very unlikely ever to implement a Mesh tool. In the hands of those artists that understand the power of the feather control it can produce outstanding results, with fewer edits.
See this. The last example takes a few seconds in Xara by using feather and transparency controls (clone a few times and adjust each), and would be very difficult in all other drawing programs I know.