It can store assets, but only Objects, Materials, Poses, Worlds, and Blender versions 3.1 and 3.2 respectively added support for Collections.
Other data blocks are planned, but some of which require to actually change the way Blender handles them. Such as brushes:
The way brushes are managed in Blender is in dire need of a complete overhaul. The plan is to tackle this is a separate project, so it is not something to expect in the Blender 3.0 release. Nevertheless the Asset Browser is designed to work as a basis for better brush management. Just like it acts as the basis for the new pose library system.
Source: Asset Browser Workshop Outcomes — Blender Developers Blog
- Merging all brushes into a single tool with brush presets
Any types of brushes would then be available as a list of brush presets in the brush settings.
Non-data-blocks are also planned, but don’t seem to have prompted more than broad, long-term thoughts so far:
Non-Blender assets, such as image or audio files, will likely be supported in a future version. For such files, asset metadata is then stored in XMP sidecar files, similar to what other software is also doing. Importers (USD, glTF, FBX, …) could add support for their file types as assets this way too. Furthermore, it should become possible to enrich an asset with a Python script, which can then provide code to be run when the asset is used.
Source: Asset Browser Introduction - Design limitations — Blender Manual
Usability changes are also planned. Such as:
Asset pushing is a way of getting assets into the asset library, where you are working on a file and want to copy the asset from that file into the library.
(…) Blender itself is not allowed to write to other blend-files than the currently open one. This rule helps to limit complexities; for example, it is hard to reliably implement an undo system when manipulating other files. The rule does get in the way of mass-updating assets when they are stored in various blend-files.
Since there is already tooling that can manipulate blend-files outside of Blender itself (see Blender Asset Tracer), it’s possible to also create an external tool for doing such edits across blend-files. Such a tool might even be implemented via Blender’s application templates system, or as an add-on; (…)
Once the asset manager is working for the basics and the UI can do its job, we can start to make things nice. This includes better handling of thumbnails, re-configuring the ID browser to allow for asset browsing, a nice UI widget for managing tags and tag-based filtering.
A key part of making the UX nice, is to make it effortless to drag assets into the scene. When dragging in objects & meshes, they should be able to snap to surfaces. When dragging in materials, the underlying target objects should highlight on rollover. You should be able to add multiple assets at a time.
Milestone ?: Project Repositories
Up to this point the asset manager will handle only the use case of appending files from a local or online repository. The next step would be making it works also for projects.
I stop the listing there, but there are quite some things to read here and there. You can follow the current development state on the Asset Browser project’s tracker page.
While I do feel that the Asset Broswer was made publicly available too soon and its does seem to have lead in fair chunk of the users feeling mislead into using a tool that wasn’t ready for their expectations, and maybe even today it should be put aside under the developers extras, I can’t tell for sure that it isn’t usable. Factually, you can work with it, so surely there are people who already use it in productions just fine.
What is definitely sure about it, is that it is not finished but is still rolling up the hill. The BF is working on so many things at the same time, and the Asset Browser is such a big piece, it’s unrealistic to expect it to be done and polished this quick.
So, let’s arm ourselves with patience, wait and see, give feedback to devs, and hopefully we get a nice asset browser soon enough.