Ok... so first off I have a Q. In the stroke & fill editor, when working with radial gradients, it has a dropdown box for "coordinates" where you can choose object or user space. Would this still work the same since all coords will be userspace?
Would _what_ work the same? As I wrote, the "object"/"user space" switch now has no immediate visible effect. It only has an effect on copy/paste style later, as far as I can see. So I plan to remove this switch. For now, please test creating your gradients in the userspace mode (with CVS version) and see if you can find an appreciable difference in rendering or behavior.
I can tell you I use both userspace and object for that option frequently.
What for (apart from pasting style)?
However, more times than not, I need to paste a style that will be the same as what was copied, not somewhere else further down along the "line" of the gradient.
I.e. so that the gradient is unmoved relative to the canvas? If so that's what userspace gradients will provide.
With CVS Inkscape, do this experiment:
1. Draw a rect, open fill&stroke, switch it from flat color to linear gradient. By default it is created with bbox coords.
2. DO NOT MOVE that rect, but Ctrl+C it and Ctrl+Shift+V style to some other objects around it.
3. Now move the original rect a bit (this will convert its gradient to userspace coords behind the scenes - no visible change) and copy/paste style from it again to compare.
head). So if you do decide to go ahead and make that change, I think I'll file an RFE for more controls over copying/pasting object styles (if the behavior could even be modified once changed).
It is possible to make an option (default off) to translate gradients to bbox on copy, so that they're pasted as in 2 above not as in 3. However this requires some more work (we need the clipboard to become a regular document, as we planned long ago, for this to work - we cannot make this coords conversion in the source document because copy must not change the source).