@ Jet and others I think Albacore's suggestion about creating a thread in Dear Xara is a good one, the program devs do watch that thread and they will even often reply there. just list the features/improvements that you'd like to see.

Now back to the OP's questions about the Shape tool it does take practice but the shape tool can be used to quite quickly do quite accurate tracing.

Here is a video of a tracing done with the shape tool