It may not apply to you, but for the benefit of any future readers who come across this thread with no experience at all, my two cents. For someone just getting started in Inkscape, I’d suggest playing around with just a few things that together seem to quickly get you on the right track:
- The “Draw Bezier curves and straight lines (Shift-F6)” tool is what I use almost exclusively when hand-tracing or otherwise drawing.
- Use the “Object to Path (Shift-Ctrl-C)” command in the “Path” menu to convert shapes, text, or whatever into paths that you can then manipulate.
- The “Edit Paths by Nodes (F2)” tool is where I do all the precision manipulation to please my aesthetic sensibilities.
- “Align and Distribute (Shift-Ctrl-A)”, obviously, is amazingly useful on objects and also when editing nodes in a path.
- And definitely wear out your “Group (Ctrl-G)” and “Ungroup (Shift-Ctrl-G)” commands, which likely goes without saying.
It’s pretty easy to start playing around with just that, and once you’re started, it’s a lot easier to come up with questions and find answers. For new Inkscape users coming at it from the perspective of CNC, note that if you set your page size in “Document Properties (Shift-Ctrl-D)” with the “stock size” and units you’d like to work in, all the boxes for X, Y, Width, and Height can use the same units and make life easy. Also, you can use math in those boxes.
One unimportant thing that gets me almost every time (but has no negative impact on anything) is that when you choose “Export PNG Image (Shift-Ctrl-E)” to save a raster image, the “Export As…” button opens a save-as window to choose where to save it, but it does not actually save it. You have to click the “Export” button just below that to actually save the PNG. (I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to open the exported PNG and bemusedly returned to Inkscape for one more click. 
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