Max 8.6 + Live color theme issues (locked_bgcolor with dynamic color)

Ah thank you for the clarification. This does seem to be some order of operations loading and applying the patcher's style attribute after the dynamic color has been set.

In our bug backlog this issue is #18995, and I've also added this thread to that ticket (which has other cases that are similar).

To be honest, for the time being, I would simply avoid combining styles and dynamic colors in any way. Either use a style and have everything a fixed color, or only use dynamic colors/default colors on the top level patcher's default colors and any specific objects. At this point, styles poison dynamic theme compatibility.

Here's a little 9.0.5 example for flushing everything in a patcher to eliminate custom styles and colors that might be helpful in whatever logic you want to have for setting colors in a patcher hierarchy. Hope this helps.

function bang()
{
	force_patcher_colors(this.patcher);
	this.patcher.applydeep(apply_colors);
}

function apply_colors(o)
{
	var p = o.subpatcher();
	if (p) {
		force_patcher_colors(p);
	} 

	setallcolordefaults(o);

    return true;
}

function setallcolordefaults(o)
{
	var attrnames = o.getboxattrnames();
	
	//post(o.maxclass, "-----------------\n");
	for (const name of attrnames) {
		var style = o.getboxattrattr(name, "style");
		// post(name, style, "\n");
		if (style == "rgba") {
			o.setattrdefault(name);
		}
	}
}

function force_patcher_colors(p)
{
	p.setattr("style", "");
	
	var attrnames = p.getattrnames();
	
	for (const name of attrnames) {
		var style = p.getattrattr(name, "style");
		if (style == "rgba") {
			p.setattrdefault(name);
		}
	}
	
    return true;
}