Just a thought:

I needed to draw some 'textbook-style' graphics recently and the only thing I found that provided sufficient control and ease of use was xfig. It is apparently a rather widely used program, judging from the .fig libraries that are part of the distribution.

There are already many widely accepted programs in the land of UNIX that are 'mature' - i.e., feature creep seems to be under control and there are many other programs or datafiles that support it.

Why don't today's desktop projects work on adjusting and integrating these programs? The user-base may be silent, but it seems to be quite large; at least large enough to support itself in many ways. Why do the leaders of the desktop projects seem to be abandoning the users they already have in an uncertain (though not necessarily futile) attempt to win a user-base that has no prior investment in any of the principles of the UNIX-world? (Among those: sharing reusable data)