Xara with its userfriendly Vector Tools and its easy creation of seamless patterns would be a great tool for creating Deformation-Maps (Alphas) as used for interactive Editing in all Digital Sculpting Programs.
Such maps could also get used as Displacement-Maps for Offline-Rendering in any Product in the market.

It would... if only Xara could transfer its Vector-Gradients to 16-Bit images.
The current 8 Bit image-output can't get used, unfortunately. Here is why.
I wonder how much work it would be to add an option to the Bitmap-Copy command which outputs higher Bit-Depth? This would open up an entirely new field of use.
Currently there's no way around doing such work in Photoshop as it is not limited to 256 shades of grey.