As the TT states, this is going to be dumb but I have to ask

What is the point of PowerPoint?

I have been using it "meaningfully" in my new role at work and I'm kind of at a loss as to why these types of programs came in to existance?

To me it feels like word without the majority of the word processing functions. It comes packed with clip art although its image editing functions are marginally above MSPaint which often means having to use an external application to create/edit images and to enter bulk text you are better off using word again. To add to this, copying from excel means pasting in to Paint or word beforehand otherwise you lose your formatting.

So what is the point, surely adding the extra clip art and slideshow function to word would save you from having another application open or better yet, use a PDF?

This seems like a whole lot of coding for something that the other programs mentioned (and thier ilk) can do already.

I have yet to find a satisfactory answer so thought I would ask here

I use this sh*t for school because it is required, if it weren't for that I wouldn't care about that piece of crap

It still is the easier way to do presentations that have some limited animations. I haven't used PowerPoint since 2003 but the drawing capabilities were pretty good back then, to the point of using it some times to design business cards and envelopes (didn't have a ms-publisher or CorelDraw license, I don't know if inkscape even existed back then).

Then I switched to macromedia director for presentations, and then to HTML/JS, and now inkscape either with jessyink or directly to pdf

Macromedia created .exe files which back then were good enough, but now windows pc's are not anymore your sole target.

Still some things are a bit hard to do, you've got to export each inkscape layer seperately and cat them together with pdftk afterwards, and code any animations with SMIL or JS by hand.

If there are animations, pdf is not a good tool anymore, so you need a browser to run your file: that means
(a) you need a folder with linked files so you lose portability (or embed everything with base64, which has performance penalties)
(b) you have to cope with browser incompatibilities

In any case I still cannot find a developer friendly tool to create presentations. I want to create graphics with inkscape, and then write a bit of code to create my animations (if I need any) and one-click package to a single runnable file...

It's obvious that svg and html should be used but coding full html from scratch is an overkill: you don't need adaptive scaling (just zooming to fit the screen is enough) you need portability and you need to be able to delve into the code once the graphical environment proves insufficient. Am I asking too much?

Powerpoint and Googlepoint is great. Can't live without these applications.

The power of PowerPoint is not in the creating but in the showing. Which is to say, I agree that adding a slideshow capability to Word would have achieved the same thing, provided it could create self-contained presentations that could play without Office being installed (like PowerPoint can). However PowerPoint also has some rudimentary animating capabilities that Word does not, things that are designed specifically for presentations. So I reckon the two domains do not entirely overlap and thus each application has its place under the sun. Otherwise we could just as well have a single monster program that does absolutely everything. Imagine the nightmare.

Regarding PDF, as someone who had the misfortune to participate in coding an engine that had to understand the format, I do not share your enthusiasm. PDF is one of the worst file formats to parse reliably, second only to HTML and MIME (an exercise for the reader: what do all those three formats have in common?).