Suppose I'm drawing a snowflake: http://members.rogers.com/rcrosbie/images/woodworking/snowflake_2c.jpg

I only need to work on one branch of that snowflake, group the paths and the others are copies of that branch that are rotated.

It's the perfect case for svg:use (I propose to call it "clone" in the UI). You create clones, rotate/move them, then work on the shape of the original and all clones are updated automatically. If there are no showstoppers in the current svg:use support, I will try to make this possible for the next release. (Which means you won't need the "preserve" mode, after all - the clones would work the same in both modes.)

I wouldn't have to do things like this if inkscape had some CAD-like path features such as: Connect path A to the midpoint of Path B; Clip path A at it's intersection with path B; etc. I'm constantly making objects to precisely find these points that I need.

When I need to draw something with such constraints, I use KSEG (http://www.mit.edu/~ibaran/kseg.html). It's very nice and powerful, although you can't easily export its drawings into SVG :(

It consists of 5 copies of the same path that are rotated, but I had to draw a lot of intermediary objects and paths to ensure that that one path would be seamless when it was rotated and combined into the larger object. It's the intermediary objects that I need to apply the transformations to.

Exactly, this is where clones are badly needed. I always wanted to have them in my vector editor, but so far no application offered exactly that kind of feature.

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