Recipe shortcuts / reference

It would be nice if a recipe only lived in one place, and all other locations were a reference to the original recipe.  It gets hard trying to organize everything, then when you copy to the brew log or cloud, it's actually a brand new recipe.  Edits in those locations should be reflected in the original recipe (like a shortcut in windows or symbolic link in unix/linux).

But what if you've made changes at brew day?  Substituted an ingredient.  Adjusted a time / temp / amount.  Each instance of a recipe is unique. storing them as a reference to one ruins them all, you lose the uniqueness.  What if this batch is the best ever?  How would you know what is different than the last time?

I works as designed very well, from the "each version is unique" point of view.  Imagine if these were Word documents with revisions.  You would eventually lose the very first original version of the document.