Streamlining Inkscape for the masses (Libre Arts)

That is not a tradeoff, or at least not the kind of tradeoff you’re implying. Upgrading libraries and such is something that you’ll need to do anyway in the long run. To put it off doesn’t mean you have more time to work on features, it just means that you’re going to spend more time porting later on because you’ll have more code to port.

There are exceptions of course. Newer releases of the library may add new features to help with porting, in which case waiting for another release could save time. Or you might be working on a feature that is so important that getting it out of the door a bit earlier is of more value to you than the time you lose because you now need to port more code to the new library version. Or it might be a legacy project that you’re planning to replace entirely. But generally speaking, one should think twice before deciding that one doesn't have time to keep the tech stack up to date, because usually it’s the other way around: if you’re short on time, the last thing you want to do is wasting it by writing new code to APIs that are already obsolete.