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that's like asking volkswagon or cadillac both will have a learning curve - it just depends on what you want to accomplish. corel will have a steeper curve simply because it does more! i've been using it since ver. 3 and i still learn new tricks!
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I would agree with Jan....Inkscape will do the trick...there is not as many tutorials, books, self help for inkscape as there is with Corel. Don't forget Corel also has a pretty good photo program...not as extensive as photoshop but still does a lot of things easily...
I guess that if I was strapped for money, I would start with inkscape and Gimp...then get Corel as I could afford it.
I've never used Corel, I'm an Inkscape person. Inkscape is pretty intuitive. Once you go through the basic, very basic, tutorial, it's easy to pick up.
Going through some of the tutorials you find on the internet can also help expose you to some of the other features available. It's a learn as you go thing. If you need to accomplish a certain thing, you can poke around in Inkscape until you find it.
That being said, I wouldn't mind trying AI or Corel due to the amount of tutorials and info available.
Being a newb to all of these programs, everyone has always told me Inscape will get the job done, but that Corel is more user friendly, easier to learn (and it's so true about having help bc of some many people around that use it, and the tutorials), and that Illy is the hardest to learn of the 3.
I downloaded Inkscape, messed around a bit, and decided to pick up a full version of Corel x3 on Ebay for $70 shipped. Going to take some of the many online tutorials. My local Community college offers an online course on it as well.
Good luck to you with making your choices. I just went thru that and Corel is where I ended up.
I have used inkscape, illustrator, artrage, xarra and photoshop. I think they all have some features that are intuitive and some that are needlessly complex. It is true that the more a program is capable of the more complicated and knowledge intensive the learning curve. However for my money Corel has the best balance of features and user friendliness. I think adobe products are better in overall features and they seem to have less software bugs but they are much harder to learn. Some examples of corels ease of use are;
one key shortcuts E= even T = top b = botom C = center and L and R =left and right respectively when aligning two or more selected objects. Also the use of the the right mouse button is far superior to any other program you can access almost every feature with it so you almost never have to go to your menus. There are many more user friendly features and some that could be way better but overall I havn't found anything that comes close. And I didn't even mention the print dialog boxes that seem to lend themselves to screenprinting.
inkscape or corelX3 
both will have a learning curve - it just depends on what you want to accomplish. corel will have a steeper curve simply because it does more! i've been using it since ver. 3 and i still learn new tricks!
