FBX Importer retains unused Material

I find that when a FBX is created with blender and reimported, materials from previous imports remain in the material list of the static mesh even though they were removed on the blender side. The only way I’ve found to get around this is to add a new material which forces the importer to “Reset to FBX” and then the unused materials get removed. This is clunky and time consuming because you have rename all of one material to something else that the importer has not yet seen (e.g., change all chrome instances to chrome.001, reimport, then change it back to what it is supposed to be).

Is there anyway to force the importer to pop up with the “Reset to FBX” on subsequent imports even if a material name has not been changed?

After months of not understanding this, I just realized that the unused material slots within the static mesh can be manually deleted with the trashcan icon. It gives a nasty warning but I’ve found no issues with doing it this way. This solves my problem.

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