Thank you all so much for your quick and highly informative responses!
tylerdurden wrote:There's no single click operation to do that expand function in inkscape.
I'd duplicate the object, kill the stroke on the top object, then send it to the back. Then, I'd path to stroke the top object and be done.
It wouldn't be too difficult to create an extension that performs the operation, but as you have discovered, there doesn't seem to be very much demand for it.
Thank you sir, that work around does do the trick and seems to be the simplest way to do it, but boy is it a lot of extra steps when working with multiple objects that all have to be broken apart and re-layered! This is something I could do with a couple of clicks in Illustrator, but took me several minutes of work in inkscape to accomplish the same thing when working with several objects.
I simply don't understand why Inkscape would lack what, to me, seems to be one of the most basic features of a vector editing program. Now I feel like a spoiled brat, lol, assuming that there must have been an equivalent in Inkscape.
Why would the fill be deleted by default? If I didn't want the fill I wouldn't have made it! I just don't get why it has to be so needlessly complicated. Sorry for ranting, I'm certainly not expecting you all to answer these questions about why Inkscape works the way it does, but I do wonder how this doesn't frustrate all of you as much as it does me?
For some context, I work in the print industry. The company I work for does screenprinting and vinyl cutting/heat press. I literally use the expand function in Illustrator every single day to prepare art for vinyl cutting or to simplify for archive purposes. For vinyl cutting you must change all strokes to filled paths and any time I send or archive art I have to expand the strokes so that when opened by other users the strokes don't act weird or change width, etc.
This is especially problematic when trying to open an Inkscape file in AI and find that my strokes no longer appear correctly as the two programs seem to interpret them differently.
Raspi wrote:There is no Expand in Inkscape, because it doesnt need to.
As far as i understand expanding means vectorizing or finalizing a filter effect.
The closest Inkscape has to expanding is converting an LPE effect into a path.
Thank you so much for the detailed response. Yes, expanding in Illustrator performs many different functions that it seems you have to do separately in Inkscape. In my experience though, 85% of the time I use it just to turn a stroked object into two separate, but grouped, fill objects. Again, I feel a little spoiled saying this, but I find it crazy that you have to make it a multi-step process in order to finalize your artwork. This is especially tedious when you are trying to expand multiple complexly "layered"(not in the sense of using layers, but stacked in different positions within a layer) objects to finalize a design you have been working on for and hour and thinking you are one step away from being done. I feel like I am building something, and then being forced to deconstruct it piece by piece and then put it back together.
Oh thank goodness! My ultimate goal is to get one of my coworkers who has no graphics experience and very little computer experience to be able to set up some very simple text based designs to take some burden off our severely understaffed art department(I'm not here to rant about my company's management...) And for multiple practical reasons I wanted to get her set up in inkscape, but with the way things work now, I would basically have to tell her not to use strokes at all or sparingly at most, because it will just make more work for me to fix them.
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So in other words I was left with only the expanded stroke. I thought I must have done something wrong, or it must be a bug, so I went searching online and found that this is apparently what it is supposed to do. I am entirely baffled as to why you would want it to automatically delete your fill but I am still trying to figure out how to do this properly. 
) The Adobe engineers have built a very powerful feature-set to establish dominance in the commercial realm.
. But we're here to help