I can appreciate inkscape as a tool, but I always dread starting it, because it somehow takes 10 seconds to start up. What is it doing in those 10 seconds?
Startup times certainly seem to be CPU bound, it pins one core to 100% during startup. This means they somehow are spending something to the tune of 1e10 cpu cycles to start a vector editor.
When inkscape is started up they use around 70 mb of ram. If they just store everything they need in ram in a linear file and load that at startup, the program would launch in a fraction of a second on an SSD.