TL;DR NUTSHELL: Drums with the color shifted (orange pad when shift is held) should play that shifted color even when receiving the 'unshifted' midi note.
I wish that drums shifted on the DBI itself would play the shifted sound upon that voice receiving note on, regardless of which midi note was sent to it. There is ONE voice that does this--the closed hihat. If you shift the open hihat, the closed hihat is sent through the harmonic color shift when receiving external note data, and it would be a lot more useful for all the voices to do this so that sequencers with only 8 pads don't have to give up the capability to play all the different voices when generally one won't be switching rapidly back and forth anyhow. It just feels like it defeats the purpose of having both midi-in and the color shift locks.
I would be much more inclined to use the DBI with some other hardware. For instance, I'd love to just program the steps in on the Beatstep Pro, but there are only 16 pads on the BSP and 19 sounds on the DBI. Even if I dropped the cowbell sound since I'll probably never use it, that's still two other sounds I'd need to drop. Conversely, if shifts just worked, I could go without mapping all the colored varieties of sounds (use one pad for the kick, decide which color of kick to use by the locked shift on the DBI though). That would also open up on the BSP to map the eight standard pads, PLUS an extra pad for a second tom and the cowbell or allow two pads for the colors of the FM drum to be easily played back to back.
Another benefit shifted pads playing their shifted notes no matter what is that smaller sample pads with only 8 pads could still be afforded access to the different drum sounds by selecting their colors on the DBI instead of as additionally needed midi notes.
I'm also just gonna sneak in here at the bottom that my biggest problem with the DBI is that you can't change patterns while record is enabled. How am I supposed to switch to an empty pattern and immediately begin recording a new beat seamlessly with that in the way? I'm only adding it here because I doubt it is something that will ever/can ever be changed 
