We are slowly working also on that

How does on get involved to help with the UI challenges/improvements?

which version of designer have it? i didn’t upgrade to latest yet.

2.0 and up.

Honestly you better save your money if you can live without it. I've been using 1.x for years and they never asked for more money so I upgraded to show my support but I don't really think it's worth forking that much amount of money yet if you're happy with 1.x

I bought Designer and Photo just a few months before 2.0 came out, and just before the window for free upgrade for existing customers begun.

I have to say it's more performant than Inkscape, clearly geared towards artists, but there are still stuff that are more easily done in Inkscape. These mostly relate to automation. To add insult to the injury there is NO plugin system for Designer. I think this is a huge oversight on Serif's part, people would be so happy to fill the gaps.

Indeed, another annoyance I have with Designer is how not purely vector it is. I mean it's great and makes it a breeze to make documents but it really sucks for making web-targeted SVGs. Both Inkscape and Illustrator support using SVG as the project file and I never have to guess if the feature I'm using is going to actually export as vector or just rasterized and embedded as a base64 PNG (which is true for fancy gradients and some of the more advanced masking, not even just the raster persona stuff).