I’ll answer what I know and throw in some opinions as someone who has also recently returned to sketch
From what I can tell, nested artboards is not something they’re looking to do. I think the idea is they want to add more “abilities” to groups, so they can do more nested artboard style things, if that makes sense. Then it’s just a naming/nomenclature thing. I’d personally prefer if groups could behave like artboards and still have the separation of concern, one thing that was annoying in Figma was the existence of groups when 99% you just want to nest an artboard. Makes more sense to me that a “Group” is a way of combining things that fit in an artboard, but have a lot of the capabilities that Figma nested boards do. Don’t quote me on that, it does seem to be the vibe from the team, but they’d have to confirm.
Cmd+D? Or do you mean something else?
Not sure the status of this, but it’s something I’ve asked for too. For now the best way to think of sketch symbols is a different workflow. Imagine its instance swaps all the way down. And you just use name nesting to sort them. It actually has some upsides and does prevent overcomplicating symbols, however I think variants would be better, I also think the methodology from Figma could be improved upon rather than copied wholesale.
You can do this today, the issue is crops are permanent, I put in a request to have it work in more the way you’d expect from Figma and it was well received, would love to see this!
I’ve also raised some issues with this workflow. When first creating symbols there is a checkbox called “Send to symbols page” which creates a new page and automatically moves every subsequent symbol there. If you uncheck this the first time you create one, all subsequent symbols are left in place, just like figma. I think there’s some issues with this, but I do also fundamentally like automatically moving symbols, as I always keep at least component page in Figma, see here for more info "Send symbol to symbols page" inconsistency - #6 by Ash
I don’t think I’ve experienced this.
Agreed. I see what smart layout is supposed to be on a conceptual level and in principle I like it. In practice I think it’s presented too simply and ends up really unpredictable. It’s quite nice for basic layouts though and sketching stuff out. Actually faster than auto layouts in those scenarios. I asssuuummme it’s a 103 feature, so next year at some point. Someone internally will give you a better answer.
A lot of the older videos are still relevant, as the core workflow hasn’t changed much. For more advanced things, a lot of that information is scattered. It tends to happen with tools with less “Buzz” people busy just doing work and fewer people making videos for new users. I’m still feeling things out and discovering alternative workflows as well.
I feel so far it’s such a mixed bag, there’s some things in Sketch I actually really missed and parts of the experience I vastly prefer to figma (The default review workflow, it being a native app, the interface is more polished and way more communicative post UI3) but there’s things that need to improve. Luckily the team seem to be super responsive nowadays and are bringing new features to market really quickly. Very polished most of the time too.