I think the botom line is that the product is already touted and advertised as on ethat can handle bitmaps as well, and it has "powerful" tools and plugin capabilities to handle raster as well as vector. I would assume that this decision came-- to include these features-- precisely due to market reasearch indicating that many people would like some raster capabilities so they would not have to keep leaving Xara to do work and then returning to add some vector items.

So if the product was designed to be equipped with exactly these type of non-vector features, why yearn for the continued exclusion of an updated set of these bitmap features?

I now that a statistics app will never be a 3D drawing program, and shouldn't. I'm only a doctor, not a physician....