Historically Corel has included actual functional goodies in odd numbered releases and eyewash and pleasant screen arrangements in the even numbered releases. If you pass up all of the even releases you won't miss much.
THAT IS SO MUCH HOGWASH. sorry bob. ive heard this story to many times and really none of it has bearing on what they do to update corel.
i started with COREL 3. on floppies. was a good stable program considering the computer power available at that time. i had a 386DX40, and it was the hot ticket)))))). if you had more then 4 MEGS OF RAM...you was badass. only scanner i could afford then was a HAND HELD, that you rolled over what you wanted to scan. COREL 3 hada good TRACE...in 4 THEY REMOVED IT!!!
so thers 1 against the old wifes tale.
COREL 4 was better then 3 in that it added a little more speed of operation, other then that and the loss of trace, it wasnt a big improvement on 3.
COREL 5, for me was BACKWARD MOVE on corels part. they leased the PLOTTER ENGINE/CODE/DRIVER to a company called EURO-CUT/CO-CUT for 2 years. goin to sign shows , this company big selling point for their software was, "euro-cut/co-cut WORKS SEEMLESSLY from inside corel." no wonder IT WAS CORELS CODE.
so for version 5 & 6 which i never used, since you could not cut direct from it.
COREL 7 WAS THE BIGGEST AND BEST REVAMP ever. and the last of the TRUE COREL PROGRAMS.
7 made the leap from a 30"x 30" workspace to a 150' x 150'. which made it a lot better for SIGNS & plotters, and they PUT THE CUTTER ABILITY BACK INTO IT. i stayed with 7 till about time 11 came out and i GOT 10!!!! another rock solid version.
COREL 8 was a mismash of COREL & XARA...a company that corel said they would help market, but instead corel took a lot of XARA CODE and from corel 8 has used them as upgrades to COREL.
9 had some problems with the text to path, and i never had it so i dont know if they ever fixed it.
i know it was FIXED with COREL 10 after 2 revisions, that was and is a rock solid version.
cant say anything bout 11, 12 never used em.
but X3 after its 2 revisions...IS ROCK SOLID.
i did the demo of X4, but dont see anytrhing eathshattering that i need.