Hallo Peter,
sorry I answer late, I spent a few days on vacation.
DrawPlus has pretty tools thye in Xara not exist. Ex. is the mesh fill-tool, roughen the edges, the replicate-tool.
But DrawPlus is still slower then Xara. If I draw things like the Breitling I'd shown, DrawPlus freezes for about two minutes and if I have the luck it crashes.
Xara is for me intuitively to handle then all other Vector Drawing Programs I know, AD included. Tha fastness in Xara is incredible and such a drawing like the Breitling Watch with 1475 objects it handles like a lightning.
The PDF Import in Xara is more precise, Xara uses the embedet fonts to reconstruct the PDF to its native. Not so in DrawPlus or PagePlus. Her some screenshots:
original PDF in Acrobat
PDF in DrawPlus
PDF in Xara
The same behavior in AffinityDesigner
There will be a lot of work for you guys. There are many thinks I miss in AD like blend-tool, mesh-fill, lines modifiyng like in AI, copy all atributes of one object and paste it in an other, transparency/fill tool may be intuitively like in Xara, 3D shadow, the possibility to create multi page documents etc. etc. etc.
I looking forward to the end version of AD and wish You all the power to create the best vector drawing tool on the market.
With the best wishes from Bavaria
Ernie