@bradlymathews thank you for elaborating on how you'd want to use this! I was chatting with @mckenna who's one of the engineers working on Table features -- we do think it would be reasonable to preserve the default filters if the writeable column key exists in the new set of columns, and just discard the others. It seems like that would solve your use case?
We created an internal feature request ticket for this, and I'll move this over to the Feature Requests section of the forum to continue tracking interest. Semi-relatedly, we also created an internal ticket for a related request about clearing default filters that came up recently: http://community.retool.com/t/reset-to-default-filters-in-new-table/24356/6?u=kbn
In terms of using .setFilter I see what you mean that that's not going to work here, I didn’t count on the filters themselves having dynamic values/referencing other Retool objects
Glad you're finding that using the New Table's Filters is generally better since the table's logic is more centralized and less spread around 