Hi Shaley.
No problem. Also in Finland many places are closed and on holidays. From next Monday on the situation goes back to normal again here.
Yes, I agree, the problem could be in my end. This permission issue, you mentioned might be true. It also could be some other application I am using, which somehow blocks BFA functionality. But this is just my further guessing based on your thoughts. Finding this kind of possible blocker would be quite a job. At the same time on Blender 3.6.5 and 4.0.2 everything works as they should.
Althougt M1 Mac Studio Max is not a rocket, if comparing to nVidia RTX cards, Apple Metal performance is quite important for me. According to my tests, it makes my product rendering work significantly faster with the modest 32 GPU cores I have.
Best to you too.