No, you completely missed my point. I’m not talking about brush management within a single tool I’m talking about multiple tools. You’re talking about loading presets in a single tool, I am talking about a multiple-tool workflow. The example of Photoshop undermines, not strengthens, your position.
Photoshop has 14 tools that utilize the brush system (Brush, Pencil, Mixer Brush, Clone Stamp, Pattern Stamp, History Brush, Art History Brush, Eraser, Blur, Sharpen, Smudge, Dodge, Burn, Sponge). That’s more than “one or a couple”.
Every single one of those 14 tools in Photoshop can independently load, tweak, and retain its own brush settings with or without saving them as a preset that goes in the ‘brush manager’ and you don’t lose any temporary changes to the settings whenever you want to switch back and forth between tools, only if you’re changing presets on the same tool. What you do to the Eraser tool’s brush settings has no bearing on what happens to the Smudge tool’s brush settings because they are separate tools, not one tool that loads an erase preset or a smudge preset or a pencil preset.
If you had to redo your brush settings or load a new preset each time you switched from the Brush tool to the Eraser tool in Photoshop would you call that a good system? 
Or from the Mixer Brush tool to the regular Brush tool or Pencil tool? People would be demanding Adobe’s heads on a pike. There is value in having separate tools that retain their own settings and that can independently load presets from the brush manager.
My position is that the concept of e.g. a Cut tool is fundamentally separate from a Scrape tool (regardless of the back-end code implementation) because of their fundamentally different behavior and you shouldn’t be forced to overwrite your settings with some sort of presets-only system when switching from one to the other. That’s precisely why there should be multiple brush “tools” in the toolbar so that you can tweak the settings of each in minor ways without affecting the other. If you want to reuse those settings at a future date, or if you have less frequently used presets, you can keep those in your brush library (which, again, is something we agree that Blender needs) and load them when needed so that we don’t end up with toolbar bloat.
I did not say people should have to manually attach a texture every time, just that not every single tweak needs to be saved into its own brush preset. It was simply one random example out of hundreds of possible examples of a temporary tweak one might do while working. 
Presets are for important things you will be using across many sculpting projects over time. A small tweak doesn’t reach that level of importance but it will be a papercut problem if you can’t switch tools and keep that temporary change during a session if you want to, say, do a Clay Strips stroke with some temp settings and then a Scrape stroke to change a shape and then go back to Clay Strips again but lose those temp Clay Strips settings in the process. If you want to switch back and forth between brushes but you lose your settings every time then every tweak has to be saved in a preset and you will end up with hundreds of garbage presets in your brush library.
Poor phrasing on my part. I only meant the “brush” type tools. I’m aware that the other tools like gestures, transform, etc. aren’t proposed to be collapsed.
And one edit later I disavowed that idea entirely in favor of a more flexible idea that is agnostic as to what goes in the toolbar. 
Another way to think of “slots” is as a Quick Favorites of brushes in the toolbar. In this way you could actually go ahead and collapse the brush tools into one tool and then instantiate it where each “instance” on the toolbar operates independently of any others; they’re the same collapsed tool but each instance can load its own preset from the brush manager/library without affecting the other instances. But because these are your favorites you won’t have to hit the brush manager to dig through your full library as often.
Again, not what I’m talking about. You’re talking about how one loads presets in a single tool, I am talking about a multiple-tool workflow. One where you can hotkey (or toolbar click) from tool to tool, not “Bring up your full brush library, pick a brush. Bring up your full brush library, pick a brush.” on a single tool. You are talking about a workflow within one tool, I am talking about a workflow within several tools.
What Blender needs is a better way of loading and managing presets, not to throw out the tool system. I am opposed to making the toolbar a superfluous UI element. Collapsing all of the brushes into one tool is throwing out the baby (the good aspects of having a toolbar) with the bathwater (reducing/eliminating toolbar bloat) unless we can add/subtract our own “tools” (aka brushes, aka brush presets) to that toolbar like a Quick Favorites.
If we only have brushes as tools (Blender right now) the logical end state is that the toolbar is going to become more and more bloated as each brush gets its own icon in the toolbar.
If we only have one collapsed brush tool then the logical end state is that we lose the ability to make temporary changes on different tools independently from one another and will be forced to dump small brush changes into the brush library as their own presets, overwhelming the library with cruft.
We need a harmonious middle ground with a great brush library/manager and a customizeable toolbar that can hold multiple “tools” (or instances) that can be modified independently from one another.
) is developing a Krita-style icon-based pie menu for Sculpt Mode:
