One thing I would find very useful would be to be able to set more in Inkscape Preferences. In particular I'd like the Stroke Style characteristics of Width, Join, Miter limit, Cap and Dash preference. I know that some/all of these can be set in preferences.xml but that is slow and a pain.
If you mean setting the defaults, then the plan is to have the notion of a "current style" in each editing window which is:
- set whenever you change an object by dropper, paste style, or fill&stroke (later also by palette)
- stored between sessions
- displayed in a current color widget (showing fill, stroke, and stroke width) at the bottom of the toolbox
- used for new objects created by drawing tools; this is settable per tool, i.e. you can configure rects and ellipses to use the current style while pen and text tool use their own style as they do now (the tool's "own style" will be settable by a "take from selected object" button in the prefs dialog tab for that tool)
Most of the underlying infrastructure for this is already in place, so it's realistic to have this implemented in 0.40. If you have any comments or objections, fire away :)