It's a dev build for a reason. The canvas itself has performance regressions, especially prominent on Windows. You'd have to wait for the development to happen, otherwise I'd like to see patches.
I see, that is indeed a highly requested feature (along with a general overhaul of the Node tool to make alternative curve methods less janky).
I'm been playing with Freehand, and the one thing that really stands out to me is the Object dialog. Current vector editors have similar designs, but none are as powerful and straightforward at the same time as Freehand's. The swatch workflow is also pretty rigid, and gives you a good imagination of what the color separations/result would look like.
I think I know who you're talking about then :) Yes, some years has passed and they are no longer active (and we have a leadership committee instead of lead devs now).
Part of it would be solved in the next major release as you've seen in the issue. Another part would be fixing the tool itself which probably requires separate time and effort.
Mind you that Inkscape is being worked on by volunteers until very recently where there are 2 new contractors specifically for fixing bugs in 1.5.
It does have Ai shortcuts to choose from in the settings, if there's problems or inaccuracies with it you can also open an issue at https://inkscape.org/report/ .
Inkscape has a lot of additional problems on MacOS, like dialogs appearing below the main window making it look like it's frozen, occasional text rendering issues, interference with input methods (on Windows too), and other problems that cannot be reproduced on Linux. To be fair a big part of it can be attributed to GTK, the underlying UI toolkit.
The problem with SVG is the different demands between browser vendors and graphic editors. Browsers for example don't need pages to be in SVG, but it's unavoidable for proper graphic design tools. That makes the advancement of an open format a lot harder, and AFAIK Inkscape devs have thought of extending SVG into their own format (in a talk at LGM).
I really hope it does, but for now it lacks in the basics such as panning (Krita can hold down a button + move pen to pan the canvas), button support (I don't think there's a way to map pen buttons to specific functions, let alone switch between them), and the drawing tools are still really basic. They are focusing on UX for the next release though, and UX issues can be discussed in the Inkscape UX Gitlab repo.
Do you have prior experience with other vector editors? For me it's pretty intuitive (save for some papercuts), but that may be due to my lack of experience with other editors.