corel draw is a drawing program, scribus a layout program: behaviors can sometimes differ.
one such case is imho the snapping to items: when you draw, you almost always only want to snap to the closest environment.
when you layout, you often want to snap to distant items. but, i agree, scribus should only snap to visible items.
i've now opened a ticket for it:
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15555but i'm not sure that restricting the snapping to the item that is the closest to the mouse pointer is a good idea.
on the other hand, i still think that the snapping to items would be much more useful if it would be "on demand" instead of a modus.
in my experience, when layouting you want almost always snap to guides, but only in specific cases to items.
finally, let's dig a bit in the history of the snapping:
i've made a patch for the shift-snap... but it has been ignored until now...
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15228there is also a ticket for removing the snap to items mode (and replacing it by the ad hoc snapping):
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15230and i think that i'll enhance my shift-snap with the same feature for the guides...
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=10988there is also a request for getting the origin to snap, too:
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=15268as you see, all (or mostly) tickets of mine... i also mentored the GSOC project that introduced the snap to items... a pet topic of mine.
but those are not all ideas of mine (inclusive the starting idea of introducing the snapping to items). i often pick up topics suggested by other people (like your idea of only snapping to visible items) and fill a ticket...
now that you had to read all this... what are your thoughts?