Inkscape is actually very good, and certainly comparable to Adobe Illustrator, if not superior nowadays. The main problem I see people have with Inkscape is when they have a MacOS computer, the only available build is from 3 years ago.

I love InkScape, but it's a little bit crashy when doing stuff like adding multiple outline borders around fonts. And the extensions are all very mysterious, slow and crash-prone when they generate insane amounts of geometry if you happen to guess the meaning of one of the parameters wrong.

Some parts of the UI are very rough to work with. The gradient editor, for instance. Sure I can use it to make any kind of gradient I want, but navigating your colour stops through a pull-down menu? Then also not marking the current colour stop in the preview gradient, means you can't see "where you are" in your gradient as the pull-down is collapsed. Makes adding colour stops very unintuitive cause you won't know where they'll appear (before or after the current point) ... there's more, but it's all this unnecessary friction for something that should be quite simple, and has been done in various better or worse ways lots of times before.

I use InkScape on the Mac. To get the most recent builds running, you need install XQuartz which is not bundled with recent OS X versions.

Even the latest XQuartz install appears to be 3 years old. Were you able to find a more recent one? I would be very interested if such a build existed.

I don't know of a standalone installer, but Macports has the current stable version (0.48.4).

Inkscape is not the same history as GIMP vs Photoshop, Inkscape is actually very very good in what it does, one doesn't even need to compare it to AI.