I think the most bang for the buck and most general would come from using 3D HW accel and moving to the extra memory provided by 64-bit. I know that running out of memory is where Adobe Illus. quickly fails on larger vector drawings, especially in the undo/redo system.
Honestly, It is hard to find people who are Interested and have the skills and time to implement it. We are just waiting for the stars to align and the right contributor(s) to show up.
It's amazing what Inkscape can do and how easy it is to do thing when it comes to vector stuff, but my version (.47) doesn't seem real stable after I've been running it for a while. All of my long edit sessions in _playing_ with advanced features have ended by it crashing.
I wasn't trying to do anything in particular so I don't remember the workflow I did each time, but it was usually after it had been up a while. Only once did I actually get to a point of saving an output w/o it crashing. I'm a complete novice when it comes to computer art/SVG art, so I'd sure I was doing something that was 'unreasonable'... :-)
'unreasonable' behavior is the kind that finds bugs the fastest, and provides us with new use cases. Please report your bugs .
http://www.inkscape.org/report_bugs.php?lang=en
I didn't try to report the bug at the time as I'm sure the developers have their plate full with other problems and since I'm not real familiar with correct operation, I didn't want to be told that I wasn't using the product 'the right way' and by being a beginner, the crashes were due to me trying to do things that I should have done differently (though I tend to believe programs shouldn't crash in such situations, but there could be workarounds that would be known if I was more adept with the program).
I recommend enabling the auto-save feature in Preference it has saved me a few times.
I can try to report bugs if I'm not made to feel worthless for reporting them if I don't also include fixes for them...like I have got on some projects...(oh the joys of open source projects
We want and need all the feedback you can give us for Inkscape. If you have issue with any inkscape contributor making you feel worthless for trying to be helpful please let us know, here or on the Devel ML. Appropriate action will be taken.
Joshua L. Blocher verbalshadow