Nadia R

That definitely make sense.
This is a wonderful suggestion! This is exactly what I've been looking for, and your video made it perfectly clear to understand.
Thank you so much for helping me out with this, it's much appreciated. 😄

I think the Blur Brush Tool is supposed to be a subtle way of blurring small areas and, as such, the blur effect is added slowly giving the user more control over what happens.
If you want a more ‘industrial strength’ blur then I would suggest using a Live Gaussian Blur Filter instead.
See attached video.
A live filter requires a tiny bit more initial set-up but, because it is non-destructive, you can adjust it later to fix things that aren’t quite right.
2021-02-23_09-06-14.mp4

I followed your advice and watched the tutorial. After messing around for a while, the macros worked and I was just irritated that there wasn't a shortcut for it and the preferences wouldn't allow me to.
But then, I dragged the little window of macros and the library into the middle panel on the right, and voila! It's now a part of the panel and is fine on start-up and everything.
 
Thank you so, so much for your help and I'm truly grateful. 

Sorry to hear that you've lost some of your presets. Unfortunately, we've had other reports of this happening with the 1.7 update. The Denoise, Clarity and Shadows / Highlights filters have been rewritten to have the same functionality as the filters found in the Develop Persona. 
For Affinity Store owners old versions of Affinity Photo can be downloaded from here: https://store.serif.com/update/windows/photo/1/