All,
As both a professional designer and my previous work in the print industry ( not publishing, but actual printing ) I can tell you without a doubt that Adobe Illustrator is the de facto standard for production of any kind of high-resolution, device independent output. There isn't a print shop or pre-flight house in the usa that doesn't have at least one license for Illustrator.
There are reasons that Illustrator is so popular that have nothing to do with quality, more to the point in fact it's just really old. With this, the reasons that Illustrator is popular, we need to focus on why it is that this fork started. Our goal is to open this application up to a wider user-base yes? If that's the case then I should think it would be in our best interests to attempt to provide some sort of mechanism for allowing users the ability to customize their own shortcuts.
This sort of system would take the form of what Macromedia did when they released Freehand 7. In the preferences for that application, there was a simple checkbox "Emulate Illustrator Shortcuts". Whence checked, the application behaved nearly identically to Illustrator.
While some have said that providing for a customization scheme for Inkscape, for some commands would prove difficult, I plead with you to find a way to make it happen. Issues in regards to the tools available in this application will mean nothing if people have to learn an entirely new set of commands to make it perform the way their used to. They won't, they'll walk.
It's the subversion game, and we're playing with all balls.
-Thomas