Maybe you are used to certain UIs and behaviors? OSS doesn't want to 'be different', it just doesn't adhere to industry practices and doesn't try to imitate the competition, especially in niches like video/photo/audio editing, which is IMHO a good thing.
I don't think the Inkscape UI is really that hard to understand, it's just different. Granted, I haven't used Photoshop and Illustrator since version 6.0, but I had no trouble getting into Gimp or Inkscape within a couple of days of using it. I didn't find it hard to grok the UI and the intended behavior, it became pretty usable very quickly (bugs aside...).
As a developer, I can easily understand what the intended behavior in these programs is, everything is very logical.... but maybe that's the problem many users have ;)
Edit: and I can see how the bugs can confuse users to no end. It might be even the greatest disadvantage, especially inkscape behaved really buggy the last time I used it half a year ago :(
I don't think the Inkscape UI is really that hard to understand, it's just different. Granted, I haven't used Photoshop and Illustrator since version 6.0, but I had no trouble getting into Gimp or Inkscape within a couple of days of using it. I didn't find it hard to grok the UI and the intended behavior, it became pretty usable very quickly (bugs aside...).
As a developer, I can easily understand what the intended behavior in these programs is, everything is very logical.... but maybe that's the problem many users have ;)
Edit: and I can see how the bugs can confuse users to no end. It might be even the greatest disadvantage, especially inkscape behaved really buggy the last time I used it half a year ago :(