To keep the record straight, your and my "conversion" in Xara yields 43 (or 42, one is overlapping, hard to tell) control points all with cusp properties. This is what I see in your post #8 where you mention Xara Designer 11.

What Illustrator did for me was to map control points precisely as originally created in a font editor, a total of about 23 control points. There are almost twice as many control points created from the original glyph in Xara; this needs work, Mike.

Do people want to have to edit x number of nodes, or 2x when a gylph is simplified?

Rhetorically yours, and congratulations again!

Gare