I read your post as a personal attack. Not report worthy, but not worthy to indulge. Good luck though :)

They have a point.

I'm kind of the other way around:

I'm used to Inkscape since forever. I'm no graphics design expert, but do know my way around Inkscape for simple SVG editing, mostly stuff shamelessly taken off Wikimedia.

Way back in college, I enrolled in an elective "graphic design" course. Of course, being a course, they used Illustrator.

That thing works nothing like Inkscape. It was a long time ago, but I remember being baffled by it, to the point of being unable of doing basic stuff.

To be fair, I had no need for learning Illustrator and no wish to do it either, so I quit the course while I still could and exchanged it. I just felt like i'd be losing my nerves on switching, when I had better stuff to do than becoming dependant on Adobe and losing my minf in the process.

Both programs may indeed sport menus in the same spots, but the menus aren't the same. They may look like the same thing, but they're really not.

It's kind of like a bus and a train. Illustrator (the bus) sports all the nice stuff (i assume) from other Adobe stuff. Just like a bus uses the same road like cars do, with the same signalization.

Inkscape is more like the train. It does things differently from say Krita or Gimp, but it also does other stuff than either Krita or Gimp. Which (dare I say) makes it more effective at what it's meant to do.