okay I see what you are getting at here. What we mean when we say its "discouraged" is that it would be better if you extracted the sparse value (since your variable is sparse in the first place) to get a sparse coo array as your solution. But if you insist on getting the dense value, then you can definitely keep using .value its just that it will perform a potentially costly densification (exactly as you mentioned, calling .toarray()).

I can see how the wording can be confusing.. signaling that perhaps .value is deprecated, would you have any suggestions on what we should warn instead? Maybe something like: "You are calling .value on a sparse expression, which returns a dense solution, consider using .sparse_value instead"?