[bobthepanda]

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but that's effectively what the current model forces you to do, to specify the elements in order that they go on top of each other. This is very bad.

I would rather have z-index so I can group elements how I want and use z-index to dictate the final display order.

[Timon3]

If the z-index worked as in CSS it wouldn't actually help with that. It would have to work relative to the root SVG instead of relative to the current stacking context.