Spot healing brush, pen pressure off wont stick.

Jeff WOW, what insight, man you could write a Photoshop book. I've never noticed that little obscure icon in 15 years using spot heaing. OK I click on it. no tooltip , no text about it, zero info,  but light or dark grey, and I think when light grey issue is resolved.

Which bring up a 2ND QUESTION.  What is going on with PS latley????

Why the heck is it suddenly defaulting to dark grey, ie pen pressure?

And I noticed on same day the patch tool, has weird hard edges, so  had to go into settings, which had not done in 15 years for that tool and choose something to fix that..

And the brush tool for first time was not soft etc etc