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> I know, I'm not a "normal" user, but I see no problem in the current 
> behavior. It is a nice feature in Draw and Impress, that *I* can decide, 
> whether I will use a tool permanently or not.

The problem is a bit compound.

First - If you make the drawing tools switch back to the Selection tool
by default, that makes the drawing workflow cumbersome *if* you don't
know that you needed to double-click the toolbar button.  (This is
buried in the Help (which no one reads) - I stumbled upon it by
accident, when trying to find the logic behind those "bPermanent" code
paths in the source).

Second - LibreOffice seems to be done to give preference to putting text
inside shapes.  This is actually quite nice when you are doing diagrams
like flowcharts, with text inside simple shapes - but it gets in your
way when you are trying to draw anything else.  As I use the drawing
tools in Impress, they frequently switch to the blinking text cursor.
This may be due to my "sloppy clicking", but I think *that* comes as a
result of me wanting to draw shapes when I've been switched back to the
Selection tool inadvertently.

(When I've seen my wife - who is definitely not a technical user - try
to draw things in Impress, she has often run into the same problem.  So
my usage pattern is not unique.)

I think we can make the drawing tools have a simpler user model, simpler
code, and more predictable behavior.

Inkscape suits me fine.  I played a bit more with it, and here's its
behavior:

1. You select a drawing tool; it gets highlighted in the toolbar.

2. You can press-drag-release to draw.  This leaves the shape you just
drew selected; you can of course tweak its handles then.

3. The current tool stays selected until you switch to another tool.

4. If a drawing tool is selected, and you single-click on an existing
shape in your drawing (i.e. press+release without dragging in the
middle), that shape gets selected.  This is a shortcut so that you don't
need to switch back to the Selection tool if the only thing you want to
do is select a shape.

5. You can toggle back and forth between the current tool and the
Selection tool by hitting the Spacebar (this is quite nice; even Corel
Draw had this behavior, and it lets you draw-tweak-draw-tweak in an
efficient fashion).

6. Hitting Esc unselects everything and maintains the current tool.
This is handy when you draw a shape, its handles appear, and you want to
draw something else, right by the existing handles - if you pressed on
them, you'd just edit the last-drawn shape; if you press Esc first, the
handles disappear and you can draw juxtaposed objects easily.

Now, Inkscape doesn't have LO's functionality of being able to put text
inside shapes automatically.  LO already lets you switch into "type
inside a shape" mode by double-clicking the shape, and that's fine.