There's another danger to Inkscape, and that's lack of progress as a professional design tool. There are holes in Inkscape functionality compared to other industry leading software, and some open source projects are starting to catch up to and in some areas exceed inkscape capabilities. If a tool used primarily for graphics, and designed for professional graphics work can not match features needed (and commonly requested by professional full time graphics people) other projects will become more popular, leading to a shift in the user base to other software.
So the attitude that inkscape works perfectly as it is, is also a slow suffocation death for the project. Confining it to specific simplistic use cases based on personal preferences, and calling what you don't personally use "bloat" is ignoring the bigger purpose of inkscape as a professional vector graphics design tool.
The "bloat" is not causing the slowness. There is a lot in Inkscape that needs refactoring, and a lot that needs refinement and optimization. We do not need to be tossing out good ideas which are asked for by our professional graphic design users that make Inkscape more useful because some users are content to use it only for laser cutting (as an example).
Please (everyone) stop referring to the hard work and superior features that are being proposed as "bloat". It's disrespectful to the devs, and its disrespectful to the design community who need Inkscape to be a fully realised vector graphics production studio.
No one is suggesting that your use case should be affected. Users who are happy with how Inkscape is will probably notice only that Inkscape is faster, has more useful node tools and layer grouping modes, and is cleaner and easier to work with in general, affording more screen real estate for drawing.
Lots of improvements on the way, let's not denounce them beforehand. That next feature you think you don't need might be the best thing that ever happened to your work flow.
Just some thoughts.
-C