Quoting jmak <jozmak@...155...>:
Good to hear that other, experience based opinions are start surfacing up. I completely agree with you that many features in professional software are motivated by marketing, the desire to overcome competition and consistency. I would like to add to this that most of the special features of professional applications are hardly used in a production environment.
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Well, I'm sorry but I have to disagree with most of your conclusions here. Starting with the assertion that experience based opinion are just now starting to surface. They have been around this project for years. I know people tend to not blow their own horns, but there has been a lot of good experience you've missed by glossing over them.
You mentioned multiple windows, but I have seen many people who prefer to have them around (there was a huge outcry when we dropped the legacy tool palette window) and those who don't. You also had a misleading dichotomy of needing to drag them around. Good OS's allow for simple control of such things, and even on Windows good apps allow for a single key toggle for those. Inkscape is among those apps.
Additionally, a large portion of work can be done with no extra dialogs called up. So saying that Inkscape requires that is very misleading.
And on one extreme, I've even worked with someone who preferred to have literally hundreds of text editor windows open and tiled all at once. Just because you've not experienced as much does not mean that other people don't have different preferences.
And I very much disagree about profesional apps being well thought out and polished. Just as a minor example, Photoshop for the longest time mangled indexed color images. And instead of fixing things, they just flipped the palettes when loading and saving. Things looked pretty for sales presentations, but completely broke down once someone needed accuracy.
You might want to drop in on the Jabber channel so you can discuss some of your opinions on things. Also, there's a huge difference between what people see on the outside of a program and what is actually going on inside. Very often new features just appear out of work on fixing existing problems. Assumptions on what is hard and what is easy are often wrong when it comes to software development. So what seems to you to be the incorrect way to develop software just might not be.