Copy ONLY what I selected. (Blender sometimes refuses)

Copying objects between .blend needs a critical overhaul.

Right now, if I copy a single object from one .blend and paste it into another, Blender often brings in every related object in the source scene — sometimes thousands of extras I didn’t intend to copy. It's all because some piece of data or SOMETHING is tied and even if you seperate objects into collections, it won't matter.

This is intolerable because sometimes object share data and it's impossible to detect how. But Regardless of any of that, the user expects what they copy and paste and nothing else.

If I copy one tree, I expect to paste one tree. If I copy six trees, I expect six trees. But instead, Blender pastes 60,000 dependencies I never asked for.

When I right-click an object in the viewport and choose Copy Objects, Blender copies everything in the scene — even though the message says “Copied 16 objects”. That should really be labelled Copy All Objects, because the user is being misled into thinking only the selected objects are copied.

Worse, if I use the context menu’s generic Copy, it reports “Copied 1 selected data-block(s)”, but on paste it duplicates the entire scene. So it’s not dependency-driven — it’s scene-driven, which makes no logical sense.

Even more crazier still, if you have no objects selected and you go to object/copy, and you have one object selected and hit it, you get: 'Copied 21 selected object(s)'. If no objects are selected then it says : 'Copied 0 selected object(s)' This is bizarre.

It's not consistent, it's not predictable and it's not making the lives of 3D artists as easy as it could.

This behaviour breaks user expectations compared to almost every other DCC and design tool. It feels like a bug, or at least like Blender is assuming too much about user intent.

Could we please have a toggle or option when pasting — e.g. Include dependencies — so users can choose whether linked data should come along or not?

At the moment, I’m forced to either rely only on appending which can have dependency crowding too if done wrong. Or manually deleting hundreds or thousands of unwanted objects every time I just want to copy and paste one thing. It’s unreasonable and completely disrupts workflow.

Making copy/paste behave predictably — consistent with standard software conventions — would massively improve usability and make Blender feel more polished and professional.

-S