So a very contentious change in the Dark Archive book is the Imaginary Weapon focus spell change, which drops the damage dice to d6s and makes the spell do force damage instead of an option of 2 physical damage types.
I don't want to talk about the balance of the damage die change at all in this thread, but I do want to talk about whether the change of damage type to force, on a spell that already had the force tag, is a net positive change or negative change and whether/why the few other spells that do have the force trait but not damage type are from the Dark Archive, and should be changed similarly for consistency? or if the Force trait + Physical Damage type is an intentional design space, maybe it is better if Imaginary Weapon stays in that space to offer the damage type flexibility it had previously?
Personally, I feel like it really should be either/or. Force spells generally would be cooler if they did physical damage, because conceptually pure force damage doesn't really make any sense to me. Most existing ones should probably do a physical damage type and keep the force tag, (which might be a slight nerf to some spells like force barrage, I guess?) or all the spells that are damaging spells with the force tag should just be force damage.
The reason I think this is that rules around damage are already convoluted and it is easy to have different readings on things like Incorporeal that specify that force damage bypasses their resist all in the Incorporeal trait, but in stat blocks just list "force" in the same way that other traits might be referenced.