this is a HUGE handicap and is currently the primary thing standing in the way of me being able to transition 100% to affinity designer... PLEASE FIX YOUR ARTBOARD HANDLING. I'm not trying to say the way you're doing it is better or worse than Adobe's way of doing it but the fact is, Adobe had a strangle hold on the industry long before you came and their way of handling the artboard is how many people's files are currently structured... we have valuable objects outside of our illustrator artboards but we still need access to these elements when opening the files later. If this isn't resolved, we'll be doomed to keep illustrator on hand while trying to use affinity designer and really... that's a fight you'll lose, if it's more convenient to keep using illustrator then we'll slowly stop using affinity designer. I have a huge library of .ai files that are incredibly handicapped by opening them in affinity designer due to the loss of data outside of original artboard area.