Martin, with all respect due you seem to be missing the point that conical/spiral gradient fills *are* re-editable in Inkscape. Why don't you just apply the patch and try it yourself? :)
Ah yes, "In Inkscape", Yes it's a lovely feature. Too bad it's not an honest feature. You going to make this very complex and not very clean in the end, random things will be rendered into raster just like Microsoft Publisher 97. Yuk.
But having editable elements that are none vector based is a maddening situation. What am I to do if I want to make something to print on the moon? Do I have to save a special 4 billion pixels per inch version?
A word comes to mind: workflow :) When you go for printing, you export to PDF. And if you ever exported to PDF from Inkscape you would notice that you can select resolution. We do rasterization for blurs and SVG filters on exporting to PDF *already*. Just how much different would it be?
And now that I know that, it explains why I had such horrible results exporting to PDF recently and had to manual go in and remove anything with transparency and bluring. Pravo, my workflow was wrecked and I didn't even know it was inkscape, I just thought it was the PDF format.
but what was the point of your angry email?
It wasn't angry, it was sardonic. We shouldn't have to have this discussion.
Regards, Martin