Animators frequently create and sculpt blendshapes right in their animation scene. This is a really normal part of animation workflow… at least in Maya (and studios that produce stylized animated content, although this is also true for more realistic animation, such as making a muscle stand out in a pose, this has plenty of uses).
Referencing is extremely powerful and granular in Maya though so it’s hard to beat… you can manipulate referenced (linked) data very freely. Surely it is more productive to think of how it could work well in Blender.
Edit mode could always block topology-altering operations when it’s entered on an object with shapekeys. I can imagine shapekeys being overriden (created, changed) just like we can override modifiers in the list. But mesh editing is moving to a node system right ? Why not include shapekeys in there ?
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