Hi @User-4cff5f1c4e,
Yeah, this is expected behavior. Dragging and dropping your static mesh into the foliage system is really just a shortcut for creating a foliage type. If you look at one of your foliage types inside the tool you’ll notice that there are a lot of properties specific to foliage that is not part of a traditional static mesh. These settings need to be stored somewhere, and that’s inside a foliage type asset. Good news is that you only need to create a foliage type asset once per mesh. Any changes you make to the foliage will automatically be saved to your existing foliage asset.