hi, the harvester is a app intended to run 'unattended'. Very often scheduled overnight. Perhaps I misunderstand but it appears your describing that an editor comes up during a harvesting job. That would go against the unattended approach.
It is possible in Geoportal Catalog to update harvested metadata via the editor, but that is a step that happens after harvesting is done. What this also means is that when an update of the metadata is harvested it will overwrite the edits made after a previous harvest of that metadata, since the source of the harvest is considered the authoritative source of that metadata.
Can you elaborate on the difference between the metadata as you harvest it and the metadata after it meets the requirements? Based on this difference I may have some suggestions.