Perhaps the author of the article can tell us why he thought the feature was unusual or confusing enough to be worth mentioning.
I think the only thing slightly confusing about it is the name. But SVG has <defs>, and we just use its terminology because we are an SVG app. And "vacuum" is very descriptive for what it does.
I said I thought it was a bad idea as soon as I saw and now an independant reviewer is saying it too, so I hope you will reconsider how this is implemented which should be easier than trying to fix me and other users who don't think it makes sense.
Other users think it makes a lot of sense. It was even suggested to provide this command as a command line option, which I'm going to do.
Another issue I am having is with the how the tool options palette works at the moment. First let me say that it is a great way to provide easy to find context information for each tool and it does that job rather well. My problem is with trying to use it the 'tool options' to set the properties of the current object. From seeing how similar tool options palettes in other programs work and because I associate those options firmly with the tool, it is very confusing to try and use it to change the current object.
If you're talking about the panel above the canvas, then it's not "tool options." Use the correct terminology and you won't have this problem :) This thing is called "tool controls" now, and it provides exactly this - additional controls for the tool. As for tool options, they're in a different place, namely in the Inkscape Preferences dialog.
Other applictions would/do leave open (their equivalent of) the Fill and Stroke dialog and it would be more obvious where to go to change the properties of the currently selected object(s)
Sure, eventually there will be a color palette at the bottom of the window for this.
Certainly when I was getting started I recall creating objects and then afterwards changing the tool settings and wondering why the still current object did not change with them. I hope I have described adquately what I mean here,
Sorry, no. I'm confused. Can you please be more specific and use only the terminology and labels that Inkscape itself uses, so we could understand what you are referring to?