some of the default in InkScape don't make a whole lot of sense, such as all the Live Preview and Apply buttons everywhere. in commercial products, everything is always live and applied on the fly, which helps a lot because you can just play around with the controls until you get the result you want. InkScape sort of expects you to already know what you want and which settings you need for that. it's not fully WYSIWYG. the way you edit filters is also pretty nuts compared to the alternatives. i never understood why FOSS apps insist on being so weird about everything. don't they know what UI expectations users coming from commercial tools have?
Discussion
long-time InkScape users probably aren't bothered by these things, but what i find is that, like with GIMP, these long-time users had these FOSS tools as their first exposure in that genre of software, so they got used to the weird workflows they have. but to everyone else, who lives out there in the real world, where other tools dominate, it's pretty weird and clunky befause the UIs are so non-standard.