First of all, thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it!

I will try to answer to your feedback on the same email since you agree in some ideas.

 1. The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which
effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how
none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because
many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be
re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and
hidden.

I think those buttons should be placed as a header of the panels area. They belong there, it makes more sense to look for them in that area and in the proposed position they break the toolbar in two categories that are not necessarily regarded as "primary and secondary" by users. The reordering of the existing tools is in my opinion questionable. I'm all for grouping similar tools under the same button (the primitives creation tools together, for instance), but the new ordering shouldn't disrupt the usual workflow unless there's a compelling reason to re-locate the tools.

We thought about this and we think you are right. Our idea was to keep in a single area all the tools that a user could need at first sight. Also, based on different user profiles and expertise levels, we divided the tools into primary and secondary tools, but we are not sure it will fit in every user need so we reverted this idea and took out the panels icons. We like the 0.91 version where all panels are actually panels instead of floating windows. Based on the gestalt idea of proximity we thought it could be useful to add panel icons to the right side as a panel bar as Gez proposed.

 b. The Align tool would be useful if it was a selection mode with the
align tools all nicely designed into the settings bar. Certainly solve
my align handles design issue if it was a tool. It might be possible to
add the distribute and grid align tools too.

We are trying not to add new features if not needed by just rearranging the current icons to keep it simple. Said that, we think that sounds like a great idea. We are not sure about the align tool (it could become a new click to open the tool options every time we want to align something). But the grid really looks like a tool and we think it should be a tool instead of a bar in the right side.With our new layout arrangement it gets moved to the right bar, next to the panels. Its only used by some developer profiles but we think it will become more useful when SVG becomes more a trend on web design as well. (it's coming!)

 e. Tweak paths has gone away. It's very useful for some cases.

We think its part of the Paths tools so we grouped all this tools together. We tried to make it clear on the document. Do you think it should be an independent tool?

 f. Not sure what edit object would do. Open the objects panel?

Sorry, it’s a typo, the correct name is “edit fill & stroke properties”. It is fixed now. :)