My question is this: Is it possible to cause edit conflicts to only load the single section edited opposed to the entire page? For instance if I edit a subsection of the Admin notice board page and I get an edit conflict, I don't want it to load the entire notice board page in edit mode, just the single section that I edited so that I can quickly fix it. Is this possible?
The main problem with such a system is that the edit that you are conflicting with may have changed the structure of the page in such a way that the section you are editing either no longer exists, or is in a different place. I expect it would be possible to detect this and only display the whole page for editing if it is absolutely required, but it would not be easy. I do know it has been discussed before, and no-one has come up with a simple solution.