Personally I think our approach is better. Our approach would be further improved with universal revision control, as you could go back and see the different version changes and merge it together.

However, I'll leave this here for discussion. Perhaps there is some use case where people won't/can't/don't communicate when they see the warning and a hard lock is needed.

Actually, I can think of one critical case. Say if a piece of content can be edited by more than one user (users, not staff). We need to assume users don't know any better. So we run into the issue of either users ignoring or not paying attention to the warnings... or problematic users editing stuff when others are editing simply to troll them.

...then again now that I think about it, even with edit locking, other users can wait until the edit is done and then go in and troll edit. So that's not fool proof.

Decided this is over-complex, simple communication, along with better revision control, is better.