The "Change/Preserve" pattern is the most portable idea here — I now write every image edit as those two lines before touching a tool, and the failure rate on product shots dropped noticeably. Your point about typography being a quit-and-go-manual failure class resonates hard: garbled text is the one defect users notice instantly, which is why I keep a dedicated text-in-image tool in my workflow (phototextedit.com handles text-region edits without redrawing the rest of the photo). The provenance section is the part most builders skip — without the stored prompt and settings, every retry is a new experiment instead of a controlled one.