I have a drawing that I've been working on and it's slowly coming together (done 100% in inkscape baby!), however if I open it in any of the newer builds since .39 (the autobuilds by Daniel) some of the places where I have some gradients and transparency are being "rendered" differently.
Yes. This is a result of a bug fixed after 0.39. Basically, if you have both a gradient with semi-transparent stops and an overall opacity of the object which uses the gradient (i.e. fill-opacity property in its style), previously Inkscape ignored the fill-opacity. This was wrong. Now it combines them together, i.e. makes a semi-transparent gradient even more transparent if its object has a fill-opacity less than 1. You can check in Batik/Adobe to see that the new rendering is correct.
Now, to fix your illustration, simply remove fill-opacity from the style= of the objects that use semi-transparent gradients, and it will look as before. Use XML editor or just text editor on your file. In new files, fill-opacity is removed automatically when you apply a gradient (but I plan to later add a slider to fill&stroke to make it editable).
I don't want to say they're displaying "wrong"
When in doubt, always check in Batik/Adobe, and submit a bug to Inkscape if you spot a discrepancy.
permanent change that was made? Or is it a temporary thing? My main concern at this point is that some of the objects showing through the skirt are at a lower # in the z-order than the actual skirt, and I can't seem to get them "behind" it.
The CVS has alt+click which "selects under", very convenient.
And this is a little OT, and probably belongs in another list... but... Does anyone know if there are plans to have better "node manipulation" tools? Meaning, the current way of being able to add nodes is ok... (a pain to work with for the most part... but can be VERY handy at other times) but are there plans to add a way to directly add nodes wherever you want on a line (versus the "in the middle" method)? I guess something akin to Illustrator's node tools where you directly work with them is what I'm looking for...
Definitely. This is in our plans. We just have a shortage of coders :)
P.S. Gorgeous illustration btw :)