This hasn’t been on our radar much; improving support for different types of fills has been one of the very rarest feature requests.
In Illustrator, the basic command is Object > Expand, to convert a pattern into a set “real” paths. But, as you have noted, there are some asterisks that can make this hard to use.
Our usual advice would be to minimize direct use of fill patterns, because they are challenging (in Inkscape, Illustrator, and elsewhere), and instead to use tiled (real) objects as the starting point.
Some possible approaches that you might consider:
- There’s a PDF with a very detailed workflow for creating tiled paths (for use with a laser cutter), here. I didn’t have great luck with it; maybe your Illustrator skills are better than mine.
- The “Hatches Rough” path effect in Inkscape can produce some very organic types of hatch fill lines. We usually *de-emphasize* this because most users are interested in uniform fills, when they want to fill something.
- We have some notes including additional methods of constructing fills in Inkscape, here.
- You may be able to tile and clip your pattern in Inkscape, following the method shown here
- It appears that it may be possible in some circumstances to print to a PDF and re-import to convert patterns into paths.
