I'd like to understand the official workflow better.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  

If you have an old project that you want to revert the hardware file for, to take advantage of template file changes, it will squash any custom material machining tokens when it reverts.   It keeps the hardware names but eliminates all the tokens, wiping out all your custom machining.  

At least that is the case for me.   Are you guys experiencing this?  How are you getting around this?  I suppose I could make a copy of the hardware file, then put them back in manually in the spreadsheet, but that's a bit of a drag.  I thought we had an easy button.....