You mention briefly starting at 11:38 that if you're sculpting at higher levels and it's not really working out or going the way you wanted that you can go back down in levels and delete higher, then you move on to shape and reshape.
I'm reading between the lines and wondering if I got this right. The purpose in deleting higher levels would be to then re-subdivide those higher level(s) that you deleted and start over to hopefully take it in the direction you wanted to, without manually trying to manipulate all of those vertices at the higher level?