Persistent Flags in Collections: Allow as Configuration Option?

Question

Great way to start the day seeing the launch of LR4 Beta!
As I'm watching the NAPP training videos Scott Kelby makes a point under the Enhancements section re: "persistent flags" that now carry over picks into Collections.  When I first started using Lightroom (circa LR1 launch) the lack of this really frustrated me.
Until I realized the brilliance of it.
I will regularly make my picks/flags in the Library and then port these selects over to a Collection.  Within that Collection, however, I would review and do sub-picks again (say for a subset of images that would go onto a website, or perhaps for individual selects that would go on for further processing, or those that would be candidates for a book).  This was very convenient and I figured it was the basis of the non-persistent design.  LR4 takes this away.
So with that in mind, while I recognize this new feature will be welcome by many I am hoping you will consider making it a configurable option under Preferences (Flag Persistence: On/Off) if it is not already there.  This way the new version will not interrupt established workflows and users can customize based on their needs.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Please realize that this is a huge deal breaker for a lot of people. Local flags are essential to the point that I would consider not adopting Lightroom 4 in a workflow because of it. I use per-collection flags a lot to make selections or sub-selections. And I'd say 80-90% of the people I have seen using Lightroom in the last few years take advantage of local flags somewhere in their workflow.
Personally, I occasionally have collections of images selected by somebody else and I want to mark my picks from that collection, or the other way round (i.e. someone picks from my collection) and that should have nothing to do with a global pick or reject status.
Or let's say I have a collection "Candidates for Social Media" and I want to pick the ones that actually go online. With global flags, I can't do that since it affects the status in all collections, for instance in one like "Candidates for Print Ads". Putting picks into a new collection instead of using flags has the huge disadvantage that it doesn't show the selection in context of the original set (plus the target collection keyboard shortcut is a toggle, so unless I go through images strictly in sequence, I am in danger of accidently removing something I wanted to add) and makes it hard to look at alternates, go back and change things etc. Plus it's an additional unnecessary collection that clutters the collections panel and makes it slower to find the relevant stuff. I guess I could probably make virtual copies instead of putting images directly into collections to work around the problem, but I'd end up with several (or depending on the type of images a lot of) completely unnecessary virtual copies that clog up the main catalog. Not a viable workaround.
Anothe major issue is that in the process of upgrading catalogs from previous versions into LR4, all the work that has gone into creating local flags in the old catalog would be completely eliminated and inaccessible. That means quite a lot of work like creating lots of additional collections in the old version before the upgrade if I wanted to bring all the existing data safely into LR4.
Proposed solution: Either support both local and global flags in parallel with different icons (which I would prefer), or make the flag behavior a per-catalog or per-collection preference. But simply changing the behavior of flags to global is just a major workflow issue. In fact, when I first encountered the new system in my LR4 test catalog, I thought I had found a major bug.