While viewing those videos about fund-raising, one point stuck in the back of my mind. Make sure you know who your target audience is.
Inkscape has bothered me a little bit by being neither quite fish or fowl. It tries to be friendly to the artist, but it forces him to learn a lot about the nature of SVG. In fact, its founding principle seems to be to use SVG as its internal representation.
(Is there a mission statement?)
I happen to like it, but that's because I'm a professional programmer, so formal languages are my bread and butter. But, if /I/ am the target audience, then the direct manipulation of XML is too weak for my taste. (I use Emacs. My favorite scenario would be to squirt the XML over to Emacs, edit, and squirt it back. . . . (with some indication of what is selected, but that's for another thread.))
So that's the conflict.
That is, it seems to me that the goal of making it friendly to the artist and friendly to the programmer are in conflict. Maybe you can do both.
Andrew