I love erase blend mode in Affinity photo. You can do clipping be groups in Photoshop but erase mode is so much easier in many cases and can replace a whole stack of clipping groups sometimes.
Would also be nice to have special custom blend modes with access to other layers pixel information . So instead of doing complicated groups of stacked layers clipping something, something we sometimes could't figure out a thing about just next day, we could just make an expression : (Layer1 max layer2) -layer1 for a mask . Or maybe a displace layer which using R and G for vector and B for distance from an image bellow working on the fly by an expression .
It could simplify layer stacks tremendously and be something having usual advantages of layers and still a bit of flexibility of nodes .
Start with erase mode for layers and groups at least . it alredy able to simplify the stack in half .
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