copy, move, write, link, hardlink: no and dealing with re-tagging

[Abbotta4]

These are my import options in config.yaml:

import:
    copy: no
    move: no
    write: no
    link: no
    hardlink: no
    duplicate_action: remove
    duplicate_keys:
        item: path
    incremental: yes
    incremental_skip_later: yes
    from_scratch: yes
    timid: yes
    group_albums: no
    log: /mnt/pool/beets/beets.log
    bell: no

My usecase is to track all of the 'correct' tags in beets but to not touch the files underneath. I imported a lot of music 'as-is' and I am trying to go back and re-tag it with commands like beet import -L artist:blink to re-tag all of the various blink-182, Blink-182, and Blink 182 albums to have the same tags from musicbrainz. Re-importing the albums like this does add the correctly tagged albums to the beets db, but it does not delete the old entry. I can see that the album is stored with the old bad tags and the new tags with the duplicates plugin: beet dup -k path -F '${path} ${artist} ${album}'. Shouldn't beets delete the old entry for the imported path?

A related issue is that I would like to clear deleted albums from the database. I have read some issues and seen that beet update is supposed to fix both of these problems, but beet update doesn't seem to actually change the db and the deleted files remain in the db.

Any suggestions?