So Adobe decided witht he most recent update to change how one of the most fundamental tools works.... The eyedropper tool.
The fun part is there is no freaking documentation on the changes of hotkeys, etc. Holding shift now no longer allows you to grab a color from a stroke and apply it to a fill, now instead it grabs a specific color within a gradient, etc. It's a nice feature, but how about you use one of those really annoying tooltip popups or the Home screen (new features section) for something useful for a change and explain how the new version of this 30 year old tool works.
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. I tried replicating this behavior on my end but could not. Would you mind confirming the exact version of the OS/Illustrator so I can better assist you? Also, try running Illustrator under Safe Mode (Windows / macOS) and share your observations.
So, I learned a bit how it works through doing my own testing/troubleshooting (putting this doc together for you), but my main issue is the lack of documentation. I had to stop work and figure out how a tool I've used for 30 years is suppossed to work now because a major change was just slipped in the new update without any form of notification, tooltip, homepage announcement, website documentaion, absolutely nothing.
Adobe needs to be more cognicent of how what they do affects their customers. This happens quite frequently and adds an avoidable layer of frustration and timewaste into our workflows.
*The screengrabs of the stroke and fill (adobe UI) are for color reference only and were taken after the fact so the strokes are not selected in the shots, but they were at the time of making the objects.
So, even after "figuring out" the new eyedropper, it seems I'm still correct, there is no way to shift+ eyedrop and transfer the swatch only over to an object. This also affects stroke widths, etc. This has created a hole in my workflow and now requires a workaround.
The only solution I have found to take the color of a 5px line and add it to a 1px line (what used to be shift+eyedrop) is to use regular eyedrop and then go back and adjust the stroke back to 1px. It just added steps to the process.
Please read the footnote I attached stating that I took those screenshots after to make it easier for you and forgot to focus on the strokes in the restaging before capture. They were in fact selected at the time and thats why the end results have strokes and not fills.
To clarify, the issue is that using shift with the eyedropper used to only grab the swatch color. Now it grabs colors from the screen rather than the object. So, if I want to take a gradient from a 5px stroke and add it to a 1 px stroke, without carrying over the stroke width (appearance), I can't because the gradients don't match exactly because it no longer grabs the swatch and if I dont hold shift, I get the right color, but also all the undesired appearance settings like stroke width, etc. Its especially harder if there are other layers involved and blend modes used when trying shift and eyedrop.
This feels alot more like a raster eyedropper like in Photoshop rather than what I have experienced with Illustrator since the beginning.
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