The Live Sketch tool in CorelDRAW 2017 seems a little similar to Astute Graphics' Dynamic Sketch plugin for Adobe Illustrator CC. Dynamic Sketch is best used with a stylus on a graphics tablet or monitor that allows drawing on screen. It's cumbersome using a mouse (and certain features like pressure and tilt settings aren't available). Wacom and Microsoft are making more on-screen drawing products, but they're expensive. The Microsoft Surface Studio looks pretty cool, but the high price will give most people sticker shock (especially with the arguably outdated graphics card in it).
Most of the other new features involve graphics tablet stylus or touch screen use. The new ways how nodes are displayed and interactive sliders might be useful for people with a regular mouse & keyboard setup. But a $199 upgrade price for those two things might be a bit steep. When closing CorelDRAW X8 yesterday I saw a pop-up saying the CorelDRAW 2017 upgrade was $129 for a limited time. I don't know if that just applies to users of X8.
Certain features in CorelDRAW X8 have been very sluggish, like font menu performance. It's slow even when many fonts are filtered from view. I'm wondering if CorelDRAW 2017 offers any improvement over that or slows down performance even worse.