the hoops… [they]… make you jump through with regard to layering

I played around with a few atomic distros and it seems like rather than layering, running things in containers is the preferred solution.

It won’t be the solution for everything that layering could “fix”, depending on your situation, but it is something that I wasn’t initially aware of when I started playing with Bazzite, Fedora Atomic, and now Aurora.

Basically, if you could just run whatever you need to run in a container, that might be another solution.