Why isn’t inkscape a more popular alternative?
I prefer Inkscape, it's what I use.
One thing to keep in mind with Inkscape, it's file format is based on SVG (and it's a more powerful implementation then what I have seen from Adobe or Corel up to CS6 and X8, but it may be the same as Inkscape is now in their current iterations (but I have no reason to think it has been improved in later iterations) and that is for the web and the limitations of color gamuts therein. You will need to use a plugin or another program to help with that. Doable, but will need that.
I do like the scripting ability (but then again, I know Python, not everyone does) and that leads for far more robust use automation. Yes, Corel and Adobe allow for that, but it's not a full access API as far as I am aware. By that I mean, I can pretty much do anything with the program and not limited to what those companies allow me to do. For instance, a complaint about people migrating from one software vendor to another is all those files that would have to be converted to another format to get something to import into the next program (not talking about 1:1 port from one program to the next, just to have something so not starting from zero when swapping programs). To my knowledge that's still a majorly manual job. Not only could I script that in Inkscape, but I could also script it to where Inkscape will run headless (not in GUI form) to increase how quickly that is done as well. Yes, it may take me 3, 4 hrs to figure out the script, but thing about trying to do that manually without scripting for decades of files or even just a few yrs of files? I haven't seen a batch export for Ai or Draw, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, but as much as people complain about that, I'm inclined to think that it doesn't, but I'm pretty sure one can't run Ai or DRAW headless (which is helpful as well in a process such as this).
Don't have to come up with the script yourself, can get 3rd party scripts (use with caution, like with anything), but some it appears are adamantly against scripting and I think that's a mistake. Efficiency and learning to be efficient with the tools that we use help increase our profits.
And then of course, you have the age old saying "you get what you pay for". More often then not (at least 51% of the time) that's true, but it's not all the time and I think people apply that saying to all the time. It does have it's limitations (like the one I mentioned early), but it just takes time to compensate, some aren't willing to put in the time and that's ok, but it's a shame. While workflow hits due to learning curve is a serious thing to contend with, that only goes so far before it's really a person not wanting to actually change and throwing up more mental roadblocks then anything else. Again not all the time, but it does happen.
There are some things that are annoying, like the default measurements being in mm instead of inches.
That's pretty standard from the software that I use as far as default settings go (especially depends on the vendor's country of origin). They typically allow for the default to be change (but not all, some only have that one unit of measurement).
