[ArchitectAnon]

Yes and no. A full revision control system would be handy but would probably have the same issues with commit comments as in software. It could help filter stuff that has been touched but the software needs to be very intelligent about marking something as actually changed. E.g. If everything is parametrically linked should it get touched by a change? and its last modified date should bump? The visual diff could highlight a whole lot of non-relevant stuff as changed.

To your other question, yes it is possible to require a change in the specification of a door because the layout has changed elsewhere, e.g. it might need to become a 1hr fire door with a door closer because the layout of a corridor changed elsewhere and it now forms part of the protected escape route.

Solving this problem is complicated. You can't link the fire resistance of the door to the wall it is in though as it is common practice to specify 30min fire doors even where they are not needed as it is a good way to get a better quality generic heavy door without specifying a particular make and model so this parameter will be commonly overridden for reasons that are not 'semantically logical' but are eminently practical in the real world. Also the two are not necessarily related anyway because a wall might have different requirements driving its specification.

Modelling the voids not the things that contain them is one way to look at the problem. It might be possible to place a sort of virtual smoke bomb object in the corridor that will try to fill the space with virtual smoke and anything that 'smoke' touches needs to have say 30mins fire resistance. However this is complicated because in my jurisdiction you can have different fire resistances required for walls, doors and ceilings forming compartments... So your smoke bomb object would need to know if it was interacting with a door, a wall, a compartment ceiling or a false ceiling and determine wether to alert that something is wrong or pass through it as if it's not there... That is assuming that the space has been modelled tightly enough in the first place to ensure that the 'smoke' doesn't leak out.

Another example of this problem of semantics is reinforced concrete structures because you can make any shape you want out of concrete it might be a wall to one thing and a part of a foundation structure to another and part of a column structure at the same time. Semantically it is one piece of concrete but it is also all three of those other things for the purposes of modelling the structure. This is a tricky problem for software to solve because you usually model those elements individually but when you generate drawings they should all show up as one homogenous lump. What tends to happen is the software sometimes fails to merge things together and you end up troubleshooting a bunch of spurious lines all over your Plans Sections and Elevations.