I have a meticulously tagged library. I am completely satisfied with the tag quality except for the Genre tag. Is there a way for Picard to look up all the tags but only update Genre?
not as far as i know. tho if you have found albums that are wrong on musicbrains you can fix them up 
or leave a note on them pointing out the problem
Does that mean you focus on the same ten tags every time? And all your files always have the same tags in them? In that case you can make use of the Preserve Tag options.
Load an example album up into Picard. Look at the bottom half of the screen, now Right Click and select “Add to Preserve Tags List”
If you look into the OPTIONS in the TAGS section you will then see the list of tags being preserved.
Test it on a couple of albums first. It should work as you need. I use this method to preserve ripping details, comments, etc. Or toggle some fields when I prefer my naming of something. No reason it shouldn’t work to block all changes.
As @IvanDobsky explained setting all the tags to be preserved would be you best bet. Also make sure to definitely not enable “Clear existing tags”. Another option is to add a script to unset all the tags you don’t want to be updated with data from MusicBrainz, something like:
$unset(artist)
Picard was not really made for only updating a single tag. It can be used for this, but it requires some effort.
And the usual advise: Even if you don’t want to Picard to touch any other tag, at least allow Picard to write the MusicBrainz IDs. This will allow you to easily update your files later without having to match them against MusicBrainz releases / recordings again.
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Is there any interest in adding the feature so that Picard only writes the tags that have been specified?
I realise the software is called MusicBrainz Picard, but I wish it would behave more generically in this regard. After a quick search, it looks as though this issue has crept up numerous times over the years, and I was surprised to find out how unintuitive it was to try and achieve this when operating the software.
It seems like backwards thinking to define a list of preserved tags. Why not a filter for tags to be written instead (seeing as Picard wants to write all that it can)? My guess is that Picard began primarily as a means to tag MB data—rather than a general audio file tagger—leading to thinking about what should be excluded instead of included.
Mp3tag exists and does a great job, so I can understand if it seems redundant to try and cover similar ground, but for those of us that use Picard complementarily, the preserved tags feature feels cumbersome: blank fields aren’t left alone, and if I’ve understood correctly, on top of maintaining a long list of tags to be preserved, I also have to be aware of what was blank before, and what has been written to after (then manually deleting them, by hand or via script, as what may be originally blank/empty is not a consistent thing between songs/albums); let me choose what I want Picard to tag rather than finding ways to restrict it from tagging what it wants to tag.
My use case: dragging in an album, wanting to have MBIDs tagged (or whatever specific MB data I may want) and to be done with it. I love the MetaBrainz services and its community of contributors, but in my case, I can’t get along with Picard in its current state. I’d love to use Picard for more than calculating AcoustIDs, but for now I must use Mp3tag to only fetch and write MBIDs (via some script I shoddily customised).
I see two solutions for those with my problem: the easiest for you would be to force preserved tags to not be written to, even when they’re empty, or the more laborious but arguably user-friendly solution of creating a filter of what Picard should tag upon saving.
Hopefully this post wasn’t too critical, and forgive me for any assumptions (I’ve not been using Picard for long), but I had to express some frustrations in the hopes that they may lead to some positive change in the future. If I can’t convince you, perhaps you can convince me why Picard is the way it is.
Thanks for your efforts.