@theducks - we are diverging a bit here but funnily enough when Kovid first announced he was changing the merging of downloaded metadata for 0.8 to give more granularity etc, I had a quite different mental picture of how it might looks. I thought it might be something like a display of your current data/fields on the left, and the downloaded data on the right, and you could choose which you wanted. Clearly it didn't turn out that way
I agree that when it comes to decisions about overwriting data it would be nice to be able to override your earlier download preferences "at the last minute" once you can see what data it would be replaced with. Doing the download multiple times to go back and forth manipulating individual flags isn't ideal. Neither is accidentally overwriting your data because you forgot what settings you last used
