Just wanted to post this here to get some opinions from other users before submitting my idea to the developers.

It seems to me that with the calligraphy tool it is unlikely that you would ever need every stoke of the brush stored as a seperate object since doing so makes a drawing unncessarily complicated.

I'm not sure about 0.45, but in 0.46 you can hold Shift to automatically add to the previously select object when using the Calligraphy tool, but I need this so often that it's impractical to always hold shift.

So I wanted to propose that a option is included on the tool control bar to allow you to toggle the automatic union or not.

A toggle could also be included to allow automatic differencing, which would create the effect of using the calligraphy tool as an eraser.

This is a mockup of the toolbar with the three modes (normal, union, difference):

That sounds like a good idea to me. I don't use the calligraphy tool that often, but I'd love an option to automatically union the strokes as I go.

This is very good idea, it is useful.

I found a downside to this, the tweak tool simplfies the path it is tweaking. On a large drawing the simplification can really ruin a image, in which case it's better to have sperate objects for each stroke.

I found this when working on Daddies Little Girl - Inks. I was union-ing the inks as I drew and when I came back to tweak the thickness of the lines on the wings a lot of the details became distorted, such as the claws on her wing. I had to start again because I didn't notice the changes until later.