1. Create some PBR content in one viewer (say the Linden viewer)
  2. Adjust some Materials properties (scales, offsets, metallic-roughness maps) of that content using another viewer with a different cache (I used Firestorm's PBR beta but could have been a Linden viewer using a different cache location), then go do other stuff at a different location and eventually logout for a few hours
  3. Switch back to the creating viewer, fly and teleport around, edit other stuff for hours, then return to the content created in Step 1.
  4. Behold that all the changes made in Step 2 have reverted, including in the editor.
  5. Logout and switch back to the viewer used to make the Step 2 changes, noting they're restored.
  6. Clear cache in the original viewer, login, and find the changes restored in this viewer, too.
If this is expected behavior, it surely wasn't expected by me!
Knowing nothing about how the viewer cache is actually implemented, I'd naively hypothesize that something about how PBR Material override properties are stored on the region or in cache make them invisible when determining whether cached instances are valid.