My experience with Illustrator was that it made no sense, so I went and read the first 50 pages of the (excellent) manual, and then I understood everything. It taught basic principles of the application philosophy which explained everything I'd been missing so far, and which would lead me to understand everything else I'd do in the future. I never had to touch the manual again.
My experience with Inkscape is that it made no sense (either on its own, or compared to Illustrator), and the manual wasn't very good, so I googled until I found an answer. Then something else didn't make sense, so I googled until I found an answer. There was never any point at which it got simpler. Learning one thing didn't help me learn anything else. There just wasn't enough coherence of design.
For example, I drew a round-rectangle, and then I needed to resize it. (Unlike Illustrator, there doesn't seem to be any way to set the size beforehand.) Inkscape resizes the corner radius, too, which is something I've never once wanted, so that's a strange default. In Illustrator, this is controlled by a checkbox labeled "Scale Corners". In Inkscape, it's a cryptic icon on a tiny button (manual: "a group of four toggle buttons, the second from the left"). Then, regardless of the setting of this toggle, as you resize the object, it still scales the corners during the drag -- that is, the live-resize shows what you're not going to get! The first 5 times I tried it, I immediately hit Undo because I was sure it was broken, or I missed something. I've never seen any other application do this. You have to trust that you got the settings right, and imagine what it's going to look like when you release the mouse button.
Inkscape is full of little frustrations like this. I love the concept of a free vector graphics editor, but I'll always use anything other than Inkscape, given the choice.
My experience with Inkscape is that it made no sense (either on its own, or compared to Illustrator), and the manual wasn't very good, so I googled until I found an answer. Then something else didn't make sense, so I googled until I found an answer. There was never any point at which it got simpler. Learning one thing didn't help me learn anything else. There just wasn't enough coherence of design.
For example, I drew a round-rectangle, and then I needed to resize it. (Unlike Illustrator, there doesn't seem to be any way to set the size beforehand.) Inkscape resizes the corner radius, too, which is something I've never once wanted, so that's a strange default. In Illustrator, this is controlled by a checkbox labeled "Scale Corners". In Inkscape, it's a cryptic icon on a tiny button (manual: "a group of four toggle buttons, the second from the left"). Then, regardless of the setting of this toggle, as you resize the object, it still scales the corners during the drag -- that is, the live-resize shows what you're not going to get! The first 5 times I tried it, I immediately hit Undo because I was sure it was broken, or I missed something. I've never seen any other application do this. You have to trust that you got the settings right, and imagine what it's going to look like when you release the mouse button.
Inkscape is full of little frustrations like this. I love the concept of a free vector graphics editor, but I'll always use anything other than Inkscape, given the choice.