:-)
So funny, we repaired the clone,... then we made it so that childs inherit the customfields from the parent and added for that an extra checkbox, which defines if the child is overwriting the displayed customfields. This checkbox is was not set in the cloning process. One line fixed it.
But I hear in your answer, that you missunderstand what I mean with child concept.
You create one product as the pattern, with the customs you need, like dropdown for size,.. images or so.... Then when you create a child, you see the stuff of the parent and you can overwrite it. You shoud try it.
Because when you want to change something later, you must change all products, in my model a lot can done via the parent.