First of all, I apologize for replying this late. It took me this long to realize the reply I had thought I'd posted got stuck at the log-in screen as I had timed out, and it's quite embarrassing.

I think I understand the Locked Presets concept after the explanation. It seems that locked settings act like mixins for presets. I.e. I can have a set of presets with my preferred brush-tips or regularly used pressure-settings, then lock those settings only. Then, I can use them to override other presets I may switch to with their own differing properties, perhaps texture, color-blending, etc, but retain the brush-tips and pressure-settings I have locked.

One can imagine having a library of presets with only certain sections customized, like preset modules, then putting together brushes by combining them together by locking those sections.

As you acknowledged, it is a very different idea than Dirty Presets, with a workflow of it own. It does seem that the problem Locked Presets solves is quite different from Dirty Presets too: Dirty Presets aims at letting users make small unforeseen changes to individual preset and not losing them, while Locked Presets lets users override a section of the brush settings of all subsequent presets with a pre-saved (or modified) preference. They overlap in intending to let the user modify brush presets without having to constantly re-save or lose them, but the functionality they provide is quite disjoint.

In fact, I would think being so different in scope, they could actually work very well together as well as on their own! I must say after reading your tilt-settings example I've been daydreaming a bit about how convenient a modular/mixin-based presets system would be like on top of retaining temporary individual changes.