FWIW, I also fall into the "clean SVG" camp. Not just for "cleanness", but also because SVG renderers won't necessarily perform as well (visual glitches and slowness) with pattern fills as with bare images.
Just tried Batik 1.4. It indeed has bad glitshes on redraw/scrolling, but these glitches are _the same_ on a filled rect vs. an <image>. So I don't know why one should be better than another. In fact, from my programmer's experience, both <image> and pattern fills must support the same set of operations (affine transforms, opacity) and therefore are likely to be rendered by mostly the same code.
As for "slowness", this is premature optimization IMHO. We should strive to save the work time of the user first, and rendering time second. Those who need highly optimized rendering will probably be knowledgeable enough to use <image>s if that indeed gives any advantage.
- there should be a command to "wrap" the selected objects into a patterned rect (determined by their collective bounding box)
Yes, I thought about it too, and it's very easy to implement (once we clear the pattern bugs, that is). It will be usable not only for converting an <image> to a filled rect but for creating non-bitmap patterns too. I think "Make a tile" is a good name for such a command.
- there should be a corrseponding command to "unwrap" the objects in an SPShape's fill pattern as they appear in the SPShape; I think it's better to make copies of each rather than destroy the pattern. I'm not sure whether this operation ought to remove the SPShape or alter its fill.
Yes, this would be nice to have too, although more difficult to implement (most of the difficulty is in finding out how many copies of the pattern you need; once you know that you need to do either boolean intersection or masking of each object in the pattern copies with the former container shape).
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