In the event somebody may find this useful, attached is a patch to HEAD to allow a simple form of attribute inheritance.
It has also been contributed as ITS#5659.. (the patch in ftp /incoming is newer than the one in the tarball)
If anyone wants to try it out, please do and let me know if there are any issues..
(this is a simple change to a demo overlay Howard Chu did some time ago, which is not built by default)