It would be great to see a new innovative way of implementing layers. On1 Photo Raw did this and is quite effective and easy to use, but I stopped using it because it was just so flakey, always crashing and losing edits. I mainly use PL7 (I am not sufficiently impressed by the PL8 updates to upgrade this year) and love what it can do, especially noise reduction, but there are those occasions when I wish it could work with layers.