@monsterfox Thank you for expressing your concerns. I get it. Nobody wants to wait twenty years for progress. I confess I still hope we see a companion pixel editor and desktop publishing tool that works alongside VS well before the 20 year mark! Some of the groundwork already in VS might even speed that up. Either way, I am glad VS exists and that it delivers a stronger and more powerful vector editing experience than what I started with years ago.
I do not have inside info, but based on how fast bugs were fixed and roadmap features were shipped, it feels possible we may not see long strings of versions like 1.7 or 1.8. By the time we hit 1.5 or 1.6, the core features might be finished and the next logical move could be 2.0. At some point everyone needs to decide when VS feels complete enough for full professional use. For me, most of what I need is already in place or can be handled through outside tools. I get almost all my daily work done in 1.3, which is a massive leap from the 2020 beta where I started.
That said, I still have a list of needs and nice to haves that would make the app even stronger. I am sure you do too. Hopefully the current feature set already covers most of what you rely on. Keeping some perspective, VS is already well ahead of Affinity and plenty of people use Affinity as their main tool!
I cannot guess how difficult or time consuming the remaining roadmap tasks are, but I hope the updates continue with the same momentum. Without pushing the developer into commitments he does not want to make, and while still leaving room for surprises and his willingness to respond to user requests, it might be worth having more focused conversations soon about which tools and features we see as the top priorities for 1.4. That way @VectorStyler can make his final decisions knowing where we as the community are coming from. As @Subpath mentioned, we've been given so much value already in VS and less has been expected from us. I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth! I know we're all so grateful to @VectorStyler for his contributions to our vector design careers.