I think I know who you're talking about then :) Yes, some years has passed and they are no longer active (and we have a leadership committee instead of lead devs now).
The pen tool is the big thing --- the ability to move a point when placing it using the control key while drawing w/ the pen tool is one thing I really miss, and in the context of the UI, the overall clean and straight-forward organization and layout, as well as supporting standard forms, so alt frees an off-curve node from association w/ the matching other, while shift constrains.
I see, that is indeed a highly requested feature (along with a general overhaul of the Node tool to make alternative curve methods less janky).
I'm been playing with Freehand, and the one thing that really stands out to me is the Object dialog. Current vector editors have similar designs, but none are as powerful and straightforward at the same time as Freehand's. The swatch workflow is also pretty rigid, and gives you a good imagination of what the color separations/result would look like.
The ability to do PostScript fills and strokes (and have them live-preview via Display PostScript) in Altsys Virtuoso was flat out _amazing_.
Ages ago, I once used the CMYK adjustment to get a rough preview of a multiple spot ink job à la Cerilica Truism (which you should have the person doing the CMYK stuff look into --- it allowed one to set paper stock colour options and then simulate multiple ink mixes, including spot colours --- also spot types, so there was only a single set of ink mixes, but if a spread had coated paper on one side and uncoated on the other, the appearance matched what one would have had to use two ink swatches for in other apps).
Also, Graphics Find and Replace is invaluable for working on complex files w/ many objects.
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
One thing about pen tool that can be kind of tricky to adjust even in 0.92 is Mass parameter, where even in that version there's not enough granularity literally just between 0, 1 and 2 (it honestly could use about a 100 levels to adjust between just 0 and 2), and the lack of granularity and pen control is made even more severe in 1.x where there's not enough granularity even between just 0 and 1, and even 1 already feels much slower than higher settings in 0.92. Though I'm not sure if fixing that would even be that pressing at all if it was just brought up to 0.92 level of performance.
I don't know if anything is solved in 1.5 dev build yet, but the calligraphy pen there seems to be even worse than before and worse than even in 1.4.4. It's frankly impressive. I take it nobody actually uses that tool for drawing at all (which would explain a lot really), otherwise the issues with it would be immediately glaring a while ago.
It's a dev build for a reason. The canvas itself has performance regressions, especially prominent on Windows. You'd have to wait for the development to happen, otherwise I'd like to see patches.
It's not so much "waiting", but rather semi-curiously checking roughly every year if anything changed whenever there's a new 1.x release popping up somewhere like this, and then promptly going back to the old version that actually works.
It does have Ai shortcuts to choose from in the settings, if there's problems or inaccuracies with it you can also open an issue at https://inkscape.org/report/ .
Inkscape has a lot of additional problems on MacOS, like dialogs appearing below the main window making it look like it's frozen, occasional text rendering issues, interference with input methods (on Windows too), and other problems that cannot be reproduced on Linux. To be fair a big part of it can be attributed to GTK, the underlying UI toolkit.
The problem with SVG is the different demands between browser vendors and graphic editors. Browsers for example don't need pages to be in SVG, but it's unavoidable for proper graphic design tools. That makes the advancement of an open format a lot harder, and AFAIK Inkscape devs have thought of extending SVG into their own format (in a talk at LGM).
I really hope it does, but for now it lacks in the basics such as panning (Krita can hold down a button + move pen to pan the canvas), button support (I don't think there's a way to map pen buttons to specific functions, let alone switch between them), and the drawing tools are still really basic. They are focusing on UX for the next release though, and UX issues can be discussed in the Inkscape UX Gitlab repo.
Do you have prior experience with other vector editors? For me it's pretty intuitive (save for some papercuts), but that may be due to my lack of experience with other editors.
I like Inkscape very much and use it for all my (usually quite simple) vector drawing needs. From the get go, it was quite intuitive to use - my first vector editor experience was with CorelDRAW 3 in the early 90s.
