> Is part of the problem authoring tools? Every time I need to make some SVG by hand
I find it strange how unfriendly or unintuitive it is to do by hand. I'd like to use it for more programmatic stuff, but it feels like more of an interchange format than something most of us should understand.
That may be one of the problems with SVG 2. SVG in its full capacity seems rarely used on the web.¹
SVG as a static vector image format, or as an export target for other tools, or as a vector image format easily scripted on the web ... all those things seem to be met already by what is implemented in browsers. What is missing have been mostly things that can be emulated with a bit more work (e.g. markers were problematic in some implementations for a while). SVG 2 brings a lot more things that make it easier for people to author SVG by hand (new path commands), as well as some features that have been simply impossible to do before (gradient meshes). But those need to be implemented, of course, and since SVG seems to be doing well enough currently, it looks like no more effort is warranted (and it seems to be hard to market it as well as new JS features). From the outside as a user of SVG it looks like all major browser vendors have given up improving their SVG support, since it's almost complete in all of them and there's mostly feature parity between them.
In a way the same happens to the canvas 2D context, but admittedly, there's little to improve or change in an immediate-mode raster graphics API since those have been mostly the same since at least the 80s, so I guess there isn't a newer specification to implement in contrast to SVG.
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¹ At work we still regularly stumble over things browser vendors broke in their latest update when it comes to SVG (we use it to build an interactive graph editing component) that apparently weren't noticed when testing on the top 1000 sites or so. It can be frustrating.
I find it strange how unfriendly or unintuitive it is to do by hand. I'd like to use it for more programmatic stuff, but it feels like more of an interchange format than something most of us should understand.