ok I calmed down a bit...

it is galling to have to wait for improvements on the drawing side... it has been sorta tiresome to be told, repeatingly, that we do not have to update until we see features we want ... but can you not see it is now rubbing salt into the wound to remove a feature that we use all the time...

speed and ease is of the essence here or we would all be still making shadows and blends from base shapes

@acorn - oh I like that

is forcing Xara into a design corner
that is entirely possible, but if so then they aught to come clean and admit they are done with the flexible approach and have nailed their colours to the mast of 'designing by numbers'