Project-local brushes

It can be often very useful to create a brush just for the current project, maybe to draw and apply a specific pattern based on a local texture, that do not make sense outside of just that project.

Blender 4.3 revamped how brushes work by putting them in asset libraries. As a result, any custom brush you make must now always be marked as an asset and available anywhere.

The current UI makes it very obtuse, but not impossible, to create a custom brush datablock stored in the current project file specifically, instead of an asset library file.

But even if you do so, you cannot access brushes saved in the current file without first marking them an asset, which is also obtuse and needs fiddling with the outliner. (Any custom brushes made before 4.3 are stuck in this limbo still sitting in the project files, by the way.)

However, if you do that, and if your project file is also in a folder marked as an asset, such a brush will then show up everywhere else, eventually cluttering the brush shelf panel with useless context specific brushes.

The clutter becomes even worse if you're using "File" → "Save Incremental" to create extra copies of the current project as a way of having backups.

As a result, it's very obtuse to have project-local brushes, and outright impossible if you also want to have actual other assets available from such projects.

This is why I'm proposing an idea of project-local brushes. Essentially, what I'd love to see here is the old way of managing brushes being reintroduced, meshed in together with this.

Ultimately all I want is for brush asset shelves and lists when you click a brush selector to also list all brushes in the current project file, including those that are NOT marked as an asset, and an extra button/choice to save a new brush into the current project file specifically, without it being marked as an asset.

My brush asset shelf, even on freshly opened Blender, is already turning into a mess, as I've been working on such a project. I'd love to be saved from this madness before it is too late.