Hi,

Don't know for you, but to me Inkscape seems to be inside the <1.0
loop forever, whereas people all around effectively use it for solving
Real Life (C)(R)(tm) tasks. Yes, it is unbearably slow, it cannot work
as a standalone prepress tool and so on and so forth. Nevertheless,
it's real tool, not toy.

I quite agree with you, but personally I don't feel the same way about the version numbers. 0.47 looks good to me, whereas 4.7 doesn't look as good, and 47.0 doesn't look as good, and 2.3 doesn't look as good. 0.4.7 also doesn't look as good. 0.47 looks nice :-)

That is, in a way the current <1.0 versioning quite misrepresents
Inkscape and its features.

Not sure about that. To me, I don't care much. But 0.47 makes me think that there have been 47 releases (ignoring ones like 0.45.1)...

Lately Hugin (which is a panorama making
tool) project adopted the YEAR.EVEN/ODD versioning scheme. Should we
probably discuss whether we need something like that?

I reckon that that's ugly. In my opinion you need to either go with "Inkscape 2010" and only have one release per year, or do it like Ubuntu does: "Inkscape 10.04" for a release next April. 2010.04, 2010.1, 2010-1.0, none of them look as good.

This would be another way to deal with the roadmap that we don't
really follow anyway.

The roadmap is a useful thing though, even if you just stick in an "Expected date of completion: July 2037"... currently I know that basic animation support is coming in 0.48. I mean 0.49. I mean 0.50. I mean 0.51...

/me ducks

Ditto