I guess that having a special dialog for reusable assets (maybe it could
be merged to the swatches window) could solve the only case that would
be missing after removing the gradient editor.
I'm thinking about a dialog with a selector to choose gradients,
patterns, or even "symbols" (user-definable objects to be used as clones
in the document).
For instance, that dialog could display all the available gradients in
the document, allowing users to replace, merge (remove exact duplicates
and leave a single instance) or remove them (one by one or choosing
"remove unused" to automatically wipe unused definitions).
It would be like a "library" dialog.
I'd love to know what you think about this idea, but I have the
impression that it will solve a lot of problems and simplify several
dialogs. It could be even a way to make "Vacuum defs" more obvious to
regular users.
Gez