I'm not sure exactly your problem or the solution you're looking for, or if any of that still needs solving, but....

When I'm drawing with the brush and specify the settings, I can also draw only once before it reverts. The best way I have found to rectify this in my work flow is to choose the direct select tool (A), select the drawn brush stroke with it, and then revert back to my brush tool (B). This seems to keep the brush settings to whatever settings were on the image I direct selected before swapping tools. It's still kind of annoying, but it gets the job done with relatively little interruption.

Well, I don't typically work with brushes except for roughing in sketches 99% of the time, so whenever I work with the brush I usually just set up the parameters on the stroke  itself and use those settings throughout the sketch. Obviously this isn't what you're needing to do with the brush, but I felt we shared a similar issue in the brush not initially maintaining the parameters it was set to.

So to answer your question the best I can; when my brush reverts to something other than what I was using, it is always the basic preset that it ends up on. And the best way I can avoid my brush reverting is to direct select a brush stroke on the stage. After that the parameters on my active brush will be preserved until I do something drastic like start making shapes of different colors or changing the color and stroke settings on my pen tool. But in reality I don't actually have saved versions of the brushes I usually use. I just adjust them on the fly and trash them after that.