Sandboxie prior to build 5.55.0 handled rules exclusively in a very simple way, a path may be Closed, Read Only, Write Only, or Open and the priority of rule application was the same, when a closed rule matched a particular path it overruled all other rules.
Starting with build 1.0.0, Sandboxie-Plus has introduced a new mechanism to evaluate and apply rules, based on how specific they are and which match level they have.
The rule specificity is a measure to how well a given rule matches a particular path, simply put the specificity is the length of characters from the begin of the path up to and including the last matching non-wildcard substring. A rule which matches only file types like "*.tmp" would have the highest specificity as it would always match the entire file path.
The process match level has a higher priority than the specificity and describes how a rule applies to a given process. Rules applying by process name or group have the strongest match level, followed by the match by negation (i.e. rules applying to all processes but the given one), while the lowest match levels have global matches, i.e. rules that apply to any process.
For this feature, a new type of path directive has been introduced Normal, which allows to restore default sandboxing behaviour for a path whose parent have been set to one of the prior 4 types.