Hello -- I am a newbie to Inkscape but find it rather inscrutable.

I've been a UX designer for more than 20 years. It seems to me the way Inkscape sets fill and stroke in Preferences as inherited from an object is very eccentric, confusing, and slow.

Ordinarily, Preferences contains global settings that one would not change often while using the app (such as Interface, Input/Output, System, Imported Images). Classically, one might go for years without changing a Preference setting.

Using different tools with varied fill and stroke is the essence of creating a drawing. As evidenced in the many, many questions from users all over the Web about how to set fill and stroke in Inkscape, the current set up is a UX barrier.

(I'm still not confident I understand it.)

My inclination would be to make the Fill and Stroke palette accessible from the tool itself, meaning double-clicking on the tool would not open Preferences but a color wheel and line selector (etc.) directly, where one would set fill and stroke (and other line and fill characteristics). This is the expected UX behavior in graphics apps generally.

Further, this little widget 

could be a shortcut to the style palette for each tool.

I imagine this has been the subject of much discussion over the years by the technical team and has been rejected for many reasons, not the least time required and complexity to make this change. But the current "inherit from object" setup is kludgy, considerably slowing down use of Inkscape and making it quite tedious. Perhaps improving the UX in this regard might be a goal?

Not sure this is an issue.

Colors can be assigned to tools in a variety of ways, as can assigning colors to objects. 

Please point me to the different ways to set fill and stroke for a tool.

This has a number of ways to set fill and stroke for an object https://inkscape.org/doc/tutorials/basic/tutorial-basic.html It doesn't explain how to set fill and stroke for a tool.

The manual explains how to set fill and stroke for objects, not a tool. http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Attributes.html

That is not a problem. The problem is when you choose, say, the Pen tool and find you are drawing a big purple line when you want to be drawing a thin black line, or the Eraser tool.....

This explains how to "customize" a tool https://inkscape.org/forums/tutorials/customize-your-inkscape-tools-styles/

It's that strange "draw a shape" method so your tool can inherit the style. (The writer, Brynn, is also perplexed by this UX design, and that was in 2014.)

This needs a lot of explanation (which I have been unable to find):

"Take from selection" requires several operations that are time-consuming and tedious. What is a faster way to set Fill and Stroke for a tool?

Maybe this: