> I'm lost. You're complaining that you'd be happy if you could do the thing I said you could do in my opening sentence as well as my closing? Sorry, but I think it is you who have

No, please put a little more thought into this. I can't tell if you don't recognize the problem with the status quo, or just can't imagine that the problem is solvable. Your proposed choices are:

1. Learn to use `systemctl edit` to safely edit a certain class of config files

2. Manually take the extra steps of making an override file that you can safely edit with normal file-editing procedures

or

3. Directly edit the systemd config files, and have your edits silently reverted at some point in the future by software updates

The problem with this situation is that #3 is the simple and obvious way to interact with config files, but it's the wrong way. And even though systemctl will detect when you've edited one of those files and warn you to run `systemctl daemon-reload`, I can't recall ever seeing that warning mention the possibility that you may have edited your config files the unsafe way and that the edits you made are at risk of being reverted.

What I'm asking for is an option 4: directly edit the config files, and not need to worry about them being silently overwritten or reverted.

I hope you can understand that this is not one of the options you've offered, but that it would provide a superior user experience to any of the other three options. And since I've already named one Linux distro that's solved at least part of this problem, we know that it's not intractable.