More new things to learn (I'll have to find and figure out the gerber export 
). The original issue is ugly because it seems to be Inkscape deciding to do this for itself. The original diode part that I cloned these from when loaded without change in Inkscape has
copper1
copper0
connector0pin (with stroke and stroke width)
connector1pin (with stroke and stroke width)
keepout
soldermask
outline
(all of which appear to be empty)
After the edit with Inkscape the empty groups are gone (which I expect doesn't matter) and the stroke and stroke width are moved in to copper0 and removed from the pin definitions. I wonder if what I want is to set transformations (in Inkscape preferences) to Preserved from the current Optimised as that is the only thing I see that talks about stroke-width, and this sort of looks like it is optimising the stroke out of the two connector pins and in to the enclosing group. Otherwise I have no clue how to convince it to not do this. As to the metadata, I did have it ticked to remove, but it seems to sometimes also then forget to keep the edit data (which enable the grid and remembers the window sizes for the next time I edit the file). I probably need to experiment more to figure out exactly what is doing this. It sometimes seems I need to save the document first in Inkscape format and then re save it as optimized svg to get it to remember the settings. I'll try all these things and see if I can figure out how to convince Inkscape to not change things.
(edit) Nope, changing transforms to preserve from optimize doesn't help, it still moves the stoke in to copper0 and out of both connectors.
Peter Van Epp