Does Serif like money? Do they want market share? I would have thought a good way of going about this is to take the top X requested features and implement those if at all possible (or give a good reason why they cannot). So they got a one time payment from me (great), but it's difficult for me to use 1.x or upgrade/purchase 2.x without this feature. Reading through this thread, I'm sure a lot of other people are in the same boat, but perhaps not.
I think a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that as users, we instinctively know we can click on an object to select it. We can ctrl-click, or shift-click to select multiple objects. We see that objects must have a list of parameters (color, line weight, layer etc.) so surely making a dialogue box that interrogates those attributes and selects based on some parameter must be easy right?
From what I see, this is one of the most requested features - so either it is impossible (or very difficult) to implement, not a priority (top requested feature..?!?) or it's being saved for 2.x to tempt people to upgrade when the time comes. This forum is for giving feedback - my feedback is that without this feature, Designer just doesn't work for a lot of what *I* do and isn't a completely viable alternative to Illustrator at this time. If I'm the niche - so be it, sucks to be me. If Serif are ignoring a huge potential customer base by adding a feature that will grow market share, that's a shame. If it's really hard to implement because of <reasons> then why not just say it? We are not moaning for the sake of moaning - most people (including me!) *really* want an alternative to Adobe right now and actually want Serif to succeed by making this piece of software better. What is the point of this forum otherwise?