Clarify Path vs Paint rendering order

Paths right now exist in some kind of vague order super position of being both on top of and behind brush strokes that as a user I don't understand what's going on. As a programmer I can make a guess but. Let me give a common example:

I'm not sure of the shape I need, but I want to fill that area, flexibility to change my mind is key. So I use a path to define its outer edge. Now when I go to quickly paint the back fill area it turns out I've painted over top of the path, silly me I didn't notice in time to undo so I have to erase it, but I erase the path that I still wanted. There's nothing I can do, the path is gone. When I duplicate the path all of the painting changes gets duplicated with it. It's like there's some extra information stored into this path I can't interact with. But if I start drawing a new path, then copy the verts and copy the brush I get the path back in full form.

From a user point of view the definition of the path is external to the painting commands and there's a list of them (that I'd like to keep orderly). And that list shows them as a distinct thing that is external, for easy editing and changes. But in practice the painting commands interleve those path definitions invisibly causing confusion and a loss of control. Trying to manage it needs arcane work arounds that aren't intuitive. Now for many types of layer I may just be able to isolate the paths on their own layer with no painting or other commands to get in the way, but when I'm trying to mask a folder it's a little more cumbersome and tedious.

My suggestion is simple, properly isolate the paths from the brush stroke order and then allow a user to sort the paths relative to the brush actions. This could be done inside the path list view, add a new entry called "brush strokes" or something. That way paths may float above the brushes as needed or be sorted below to get erased by them as needed but a user has explicit and transparent control. Rather than bloating layer stacks or using arcane workarounds to trick the app into behaving. With that nobody's workflow should be interuppted and their workfiles kept clean. Paths are a dynamic changable thing, just treating them as a single brush in the pile throws off their best feature when you try to use it.