Very good observation Jon, I have noticed this as well, particularly in the web gallery. I think it would be wrong to assume that xara products are used by professionals, and that is not because the products are not upto it, it is simply that in colleges/universities it is adobe products which dominate and this flows into graphic design businesses, all our designers use adobe products.

I have only used webdesigner from xara so I can't really comment on the suitability of the other programs for professional work, but I have been lucky to come across webdesigner a couple of years ago and business has been good (120+ websites so far) but even now we do more work with wordpress as more and more clients demand features such as cms, which as we all now is not something which is viable with xara.

Also I feel that with the recent release of webdesigner (9) there is nothing earth shattering, very akin to apple's myriad releases of the iphone; polish it a little and improve what it already does. If new users are to attracted to the product their needs to be a much more current offering from xara. Just look at the offering for some of the other software companies such as wysiwyg web builder which now has cms built in.

I remember when I first joined this forum there seemed to be far more new threads and I too have noticed a lull, hopefully it is just a short-term problem.