Ok, I have thought about this again, and I like the idea of getting rid of the bbox fill... but Josh is right, when you have a multiple objects selected and you don't want them to have one gradient, but a gradient each (just assume you want to draw many spheres -- different size maybe -- and you want to give them all a "3d" kinda radial gradient) what you'd have to do if we get rid of bbox is do the gradients one by one. (or am I mistaken here?) Now while I never liked bbox fills for librsvg screws them up most of the time (I know, not an inkscape problem) I see that they are useful for this. There should be something to toggle between "fill objects as one" and "fill each object seperate" if you have multiple objects selected. I'm not sure how this will work internally (have canvas fills afterall) but for the UI (considering the desired effect) I guess that's more understandable than than object and user_space.
David
PS: this was not actually the thread I was looking for right now :)