Hi Danny - yeah the styles are kind of similar to layers in several aspects, but not quite identical.

It is a big focus to be able to use them to control the visual appearance of your model, including setting it up for a rendering. That's why there is this feature of having faces within a solid able to have different styles assigned to them, rather than the whole solid only being one elemental material.

Having that limitation of "entire solid is on one layer/style", would have much more the kind of behavior that you are talking about, but it can cause a lot of difficulties when you want to render, maybe forcing you to use some entirely different mechanism to handle render styles, or maybe forcing you to modify your geometry to break it into smaller sets if you want to have different faces to have different materials. I'm hoping to avoid the need for that kind of stuff.

We'll have to see how different the styles behave in practice to layers - I think that there is enough similarity that it will likely work well for many things to use them in a similar fashion to layers but we'll see.

But yeah in addition to Styles you'll have groups and named objects that you can also use... I've thought a little bit about possibly having the idea of an "Active group" that you could set as well, but I'm not quite sure.

- Michael