As I cannot reach launchpad (with all of China having holidays I cannot even reach Tav's Inkscape manual pages). I'd like to drop this wish/idea here.

Ehmm,.. Setting swatches seems less than intuitive to me and I cannot access the manual. Maybe there is a method already that I am not aware of, but how feasible would it be to create a swatch object and then drop the colour into it from the document. Lets say that I'd like to create a number of swatches in a non defined set of colours. I'd make 32 swatches of non defined colour (Additional Button: New) and just pick them up from the screen through the colour picker and change them to my hearts content and save them into a new list. It would make the whole swatch list into a great productivity tool and it wouldn't take too much effort I think to make it possible. In this setup making a new button with a delete function would be logical as well, just to be complete.

It is nice to have all those predefined swatches around, but a simple and fast method to create and save your own seems a much better option to me. Also taking a predef swatch list and adding your custom colours to it might be a nice option. Saving the thus created swatch list could force a save as to keep the predefined swatch lists clean. 

When selecting the names of the swatches in the list, it would be a nice thing if you could reorder them, so you don't have to scroll down to the bottom every time. Maybe a save as and using an underscore _ could be a simple way to force them to the top.

Reordering the swatches themselves would also be great to have. One may use 200 or more swatches, but finding the more common ones can be a bit of a hassle. Maybe something like a palette within the swatch docker would be an option. Let the user create a grid of size Columns x Rows and drag his preferred swatches to it.

Any option on swatches I actually would expect to find in the swatch menu. Currently the interface has two very similar icons in it. A top menu icon with a left pointing arrow and one a few pixels lower with the same shape giving a drop down menu. How about making the second one a arrow pointing down to make clear it is something dropping down?

Could be a nice GSOC project ;-)

Cheers,

Jelle