Feature Ideas: Rework Custom Shape Tool, Masking Effects, Better Layer Styles and Better Filter Gallery

I’d like to suggest the following features, which would greatly speed up some workflows out here.
Starting with:

• Custom Shape Tool:
  • Currently when we are saving a complex shape with more than one element, let’s say a shape made from a text layer with 2 characters or more, later on if we use the Custom Shape Tool to place that custom shape, you can no longer edit it’s elements (the letters in that case) individually with the Direction selection tool. It would be insanely useful to keep each element individually editable, meaning you can choose to warp, free transform, skew etc just the element that you want. A current workaround for that is saving the shape layer in the Libraries, it stays editable that way.
• Masking Effects:
  • I know we already something for this, but what I meant for that, is some kind of mask that only affects the Layer Styles, so we wouldn’t need to go the destructive way and use Create Layer, or the longer workaround duplicating layers and such.
• Better Layer Styles:
  • It would be great to have more variations for the Layer Styles, such as:
    • Gradient Drop Shadow
    • Gradient Outer Glow
  • The other ideias ran out of my mind now, srry
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• Better Filter Gallery:
  • By better filter gallery, I mean possibly making some effects also work on images/layers without a background… for example making it work on a text layer that was converted to a smart object, with no layer styles on it.
    That single change would improve many workflows that relies on filter galleries, because sometimes all we want is use the filter gallery on a transparent image, which currently you can’t / are very limited (only a set of filters from the gallery filters works on transparent images without background)