Well... since it's been ages i've posted anything, I guess I should explain what's been going on... (not that anyone reads journals anyway) :P

My time has been spent figuring out and attempting to configuring Inkscape for inking purposes, mainly the Live Path Effects. (LPE)
The default LPE stroke effects are limited, so I had finished making a list of some custom LPE strokes to replace them.
Now a "Triangle In, Ellipse" now scales correctly (1=1px, not 1=10px) and varying fade percentages can be pasted. (example: start fading in at 50% length)

As expected though there are still many bugs present, such as if a node is angled (not smooth) the stroke becomes pinched. (a "black hole" node)
For such lines I still have to do the old time-consuming "Stroke to Path" and manually modify nodes to get a fade... but at least now I suppose it's not all the time.
Also converting the LPE to a path does have the high chance of creaing a parasite node, where one node suddenly becomes two sharing the same spot.

I do know of the proposed "Power Strokes" feature planned for 0.49, but with 700+ bugs in it's Launchpad list that'll be possibly a year away... if real lucky...

Attempted to make patterns as well but applying/modifying that failed miserably... bleh... soo much time wasted there...

Tried to use it for coloring but kept hitting brick walls with it's limits/hangs/crashes, clearly just not designed for such things i'm trying. ^^;
Tested a Windows build of Krita in the hopes that would be suitable replacement, but sadly the tablet support is still completely broken. (shame since the brush sub-sampling appears much better than GIMP)
-sigh- ...Why the GIMP developers would shun the brush sub-sampling improvement I just don't understand, it was even shown to be possible many years ago.

...oh my little poor dial-up, why must you keep getting more poor and unstable nowadays? I can hardly use you most of the time... >.<