I'm finding that for my day to day needs (which include professional academic writing in the humanities) it's perfectly adequate. Yes, I long for some more advanced features—table cell padding and cell spacing, for instance—but in terms of what I do, which is writing academic essays, it's great.
So for 3.0, here's what I'd like to see:
- Editable styles of footnote/endnote reference numbers
A re-imagining of the document manager window, and of document management in general.
A "sort A-Z" command that ignores "the"
A normal style with spacing after a paragraph set to 0.
Bookmarking of some kind. I think there's room here to get a leg up on the others.
Comment/notation features of some kind. There's room here, too, to get a leg up.
Customizable highlight colors.
A clear way to convert footnotes to endnotes and vice versa. Perhaps under the Edit>Convert menu?
A better "insert date/time" macro.
Nisus folks, I hope you have a big bottle of champagne ready for the 2.5 release.