I’m afraid I'm not great at drawing at all and don’t really enjoy doing it, but along with perspective and understanding light etc, I do recognise it’s one of the key fundamental requirements for producing better quality art.

Sharing your progress and ideas to a relevant online community, and as Rik mentioned, taking part in challenges can be beneficial (and fun) and help raise standards, particularly when mixing with experienced artists. Personally I find this provides a little extra motivation to do something that I wouldn't normally do.

If you look through the Xara art galleries and see examples of the type and quality of output you eventually want to achieve, then Xara software will probably be the program to focus your time on, learning it inside and out, warts and all. I think there is great merit in this approach, everything becoming second nature knowing where everything is, what it does and having the ability to workaround problems when it doesn't actually do what you want it do straight out of the box.

I would say though, workflows nowadays are seldom just contained just within one program and I wouldn't be blind to alternative options if they do what you want more quickly and efficiently.

An example came up recently on the forum where someone (Rik) was drawing a mechanical gear cog. You can easily and effectively do this in XDP, but if you then had to draw a further 25 cogs with varying numbers of teeth and hole radii etc, using Affinity Designer's cog tool would save a lot of time and effort.

Anyway, good luck with your journey ahead - I'm quite excited for you. Keep us posted!