maybe import filters could also be a goal. personally i'd love to see CorelDraw import. But i guess there are other more common formats, and cdr files seem to be hard to reverse engineer. On the other side, CorelDraw has quite a similar user interface, so new users may come from there ;)
I put a bit of work into .cdr a few months ago and figured out the basic structure. It's actually quite SVG-like in that it has a nested structure of layers containing groups containing objects, each of which could probably be converted in isolation.
What I have is a piece of Python which dumps each object in the tree as hex, and a few notes about what some of the fields mean. If you or anybody else wants to take that and make a full converter out of it, by all means send me an e-mail and I'll send you what I've got and try to remember all the things I worked out but didn't write down. The hex dumps may sound frightening, but all the constants and some of the structures are identical to those used in CorelDraw's Visual Basic scripting language and hence are documented in the programmer's reference help files. It should just be time-consuming but not difficult to write a decoder and SVG generator for each object type.
I'd like to take a look at it. maybe, it should be contributed to the uber-converter. well, i was frustrated really soon when i looked into cdr files some weeks ago... couldn't belive that empty files are always stored in different ways... what version did you use? i have CorelDraw 8 available and... err... 3 :)
greets, Daniel