Good Questions/Observations:
Currently the Analysis Configuration Attribute - though it is used by SMTK’s GUI system to control what information is displayed in the GUI, does not get used by the Attribute Resource itself. In the proposed system, the Analysis Configuration Attribute would be used by the GUI to set the Resource’s Active Categories so I don’t think there would be a conflict per se.
If the Attribute Resource does not have any active categories set, I propose that it should work as it does today which would be to ignore category filtering when it comes to validity checking. In terms of default values, no categories would mean either use the default value that was specified without categories (which is what we have currently) or if all defaults are associated with categories, the item would have no default and would be considered unset.