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The engine itself only cares about whether a sculpt/painting is "live" or not when edits are made to the sculpt itself. And the only time a creator uses the fact that a sculpt is live or not is when they edit a sculpt.

So my suggestion is that the entire "live clone" system be flipped on its head. When we go in to edit a sculpt and there are identical clones in the scene, a red context menu button is shown. This both informs the creator there are other cloned sculpts so if you edit this one it'll become unique. But you can also click it to toggle on "live edit mode." While editing with "live edit mode" on, all identical clones will be changed--just like they were all live. And while editing with "live edit mode" off, this sculpt will become unique with its own alloted graphics thermo.

I feel this would greatly simplify things. No need for tools, and marking sculpts as live or non-live. No going in to edit a sculpt and realising you wanted it to be live but it isn't, or you wanted it to be non-live but it's live, and then going back out to find the tool and change its status.

In the moment you want all the clones to also update for the coming edits, you just turn that setting on and start editing.

Merging (blue sky ideas)

We could even have a button that would let us retroactively merge in the changes we made since we went in to edit the sculpt. Then if you started editing one head of a puppet and do a wonderful job with it... but then realise none of the others have the face, press a button and those changes will be merged in to the others.

Or alternatively, a more powerful way of doing this would be to have a tool that simply lets us click on the "source" sculpt, and then click on some other sculpt. And the other sculpt and all its clones will now point at the "source" sculpt. It would keep all its other stuff like position, tweak settings, etc. In the above example, you'd click on the nicely sculpted head, and then on the basic head you'd started with, and all the basic heads in the scene will now look like the nicely sculpted head.

The way the sculpts are stored is really powerful, so it would allow us to do these kinds of wide-sweeping changes very easily... if only we had the access. Mistakes like the one above would are very easily rectified at the engine level, so having a tool that lets us more directly fix that stuff would be amazing to have!