In a typical workflow of mine, I repeatedly need to set a Character style shortly after having set a Paragraph style or vice-versa. At the moment, I am currently forced to switch style categories back-and-forth, which is a bit annoying. It would be nice if I could choose to show _both_ Paragraph and Character styles in the sidebar at once (e.g. alphabetically; but even a hierarchy in which they each have their own root is fine). Note that the annoyance is further exacerbated due to the non-persistence of the hierarchy state (bug 141592).
Note that, in MS Word, different categories of styles (paragraph, character etc.) are distinguished by a category icon next to the style name. This could work for us as well in a joint view.
Absolutely yes. Merging the styles into one deck is part of bug 90646 and hopefully done during this year GSoC. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 90646 ***