Hi all,
From a designers point of view I would stay away from generated faux font styles as far as possible. There is a reason why not all fonts have these styles that often go beyond the humongous amount of work that needs to be put into creating a font. If a designer really wants to screw up a font creators work, they can use stroke thickness, skew, stretch or even envelopes. But any experienced designer not satisfied with the look of a font will normally find himself exactly that one that fits his desired balance of whitespace and content. It's part of the skill of a designer to find the correct font that supports the design and typography.
Font design itself is a work of dedication and skill that has always been beyond me and goes well beyond what normally meets the eye at 14px. Having tools like Fontforge really didn't do font design all that good if I have a look at modern fonts with their horrible flows, kerning, baseline shifts, corrupt edges and what all more. It's often like everyone with a camera being a photographer or everyone that knows how to push buttons in dreamweaver calling themselves web designer.
As long as Inkscape doesn't really support CMYK, Hexachrome, Spot colours and the like, it can never be considered a truly professional tool for print. SVG supports named colours that might be used to simulate spot colours, but it is a rather small palette and the SVG standard just doesn't support anything but sRGB really. Pantone will not give a license to Inkscape for free I gather as they make a living on this and a good one.
Color support can only be done using Inkscape namespaces with the sRGB equivalent in the style or attributes next to it and is dependent on output devises as well. Would be a hell of a lot of work to figure out even a few color profiles and quite some wasted resources for the one who does that. Maybe some university might be interested in doing that or some very progressive printer with deep pockets? The latter at this moment not available in Europe at least or will be hard to find. It's a massacre at the moment.
If I would like to see anything in SVG 2.0 it would be arbitrary color spaces. Some way to define a color and it's sRGB equivalent in XML and link that up to the SVG file, like is being done with @fonts. @colorProfile or so.
I convert the colors in Coreldraw from a Inkscape PDF export. The only reason I still use it and am bound to Windows.
My 2 Feng,
Jelle