Good post Tremendous. I just downloaded Inkscape last night and had a quick play.

Inkscape does seem to have some nice features. Strokes seem more flexible than Xara, and connectors are really handy (although at first glance Inkscape doesn't seem to have the control over connectors that OpenOffice Draw does in thing like orthogonal (horizontal/vertical constrained) connector styles.

On the other hand Inkscape is far from having the fast and intuitive UI that is Xaras best feature.

Redraw is slow, and Inkscape has some of the same "dialogue box-itis" that afflicts CorelDraw (and Illustrator I believe). Lots of things like putting multiple colour stations on a linear fill use complex popup dialogs with percentage positions rather than Xaras drag-and-drop-a-colour immediacy. Inkscape's handling of Arrow heads and tails on lines also seems absolutely ghastly, unless I was using the wrong function.

The ideal of course would be a merge of the best features of both. If Xara, in terms of UI, rendering speed and quality, could somehow be merged with the new Inkscape features (and maybe one say SVG file format as a native option) you would have a formidable tool indeed.

Oh well, it's nice to dream :-)