Interesting, indeed. I think of "Format Painter" as a tool that "paints" the format of one object to another, rather than a tool that simply copies & pastes. Whether that object has 1 state or 10, shouldn't matter if you think of it like this.
As I said earlier, the implications could be huge. Imagine a project where I had 6 states per object, 10 objects per page, 20 pages per scene and 5 scenes in the project. Then, the client wants to make a change and needs only a single state per object. That would require manually deleting 5,000 states! I realize that's probably an exaggerated circumstance, however, I do have projects for clients that are not too far off from that amount.
If "Format Painter" is truly more a "Format Copy/Paste", then perhaps we need a "Format Eraser"?