The gradient handling has seen some significant changes since 0.48.
Oh good! I had the occasion to work with gradients today and was thinking about how it would be nice to be able to import gradients, like .ggr - or from an image (I think the stops were equidistant, determined by the colours extant in the image, and ordered by number of pixels with that colour) like IFS tool Apophysis, although this should probably be reserved for an extension. Having a curves editor as in GIMP would be nice too but not essential.
-Arlo James Barnes