I made a change to my v4 master at the application level to hide a certain piece of HTML code (the developer dashboard to be specific). I assumed I could edit it at the application level and then all site collections created within that application would inherit the changed v4 master and hide the element.
This is not the case though... in addition, I tried to edit the master in 14\TEMPLATES\LAYOUTS with no success either.
The only thing I have gotten to work is editing the v4 in SP designer at the site level (which is unaccepable to me as I want to provision a new site collection and not have to manually change this every time).
Any suggestions / known fixes for the issue I am encountering?