Wow that's disappointing on many levels. I hope you are aware your response reads more as shootdown than a helpful reply.
regardless..
Its not a complicated idea, I'd just like to be able to tell the game engine to skip certain functions on a given layer, leveraging further the layer functionality.
For example in a simple game, a pause menu could be a layer that shows itself while disabling the begin, step, end, alarms, collisions and animation frame updates of all objects on a given layer. By disabling everything but the draw function, it would allow pausing and impact frames without the overhead of copying everything to a new surface. If it was a function you pass a flag in to (eg layer_updates(layerid, flags), the user could control what parts are disabled, leaving the potential to have animations or shaders continue when the layer is paused.