By Jove, I think he's got it! ;-)
One question -- might just be a terminology/translation issue between Mayan and Softese -- in point 3, when you say "without entering the layer," I assume you mean what currently happens when you click on/highlight the layer. If that's correct, then yeah, you'd be modeling Soft's pass editor (explorer) workflow, which allows you to see the structure of a pass without actually being "in" the pass. In Soft, to "enter" the pass, we have a context menu item called "make (selected) pass current."
