@florent Finally getting back to this post, I know it's been months, just haven't had a lot of time, sorry!
I think I am still a bit confused, but I will do some additional testing to see if I can confirm my suspicions.
My confusion is that, you can't merge the deltas into the key if the key is locked behind Object Lock, the file isn't writable so you can't do the merge operation, right?
So that being said, it sounds to me like maybe the retention of the object lock/immutability needs to be set to be less than the retention period in XOA, right?
This way the original key is not immutable and can be written to when the merge happens?
Or does XOA just "wait" until the key isn't locked and then do the merge operation?