redesign of layers?

[Arigead <arigead gmail com>]

Hello all,
    hopefully the answer to this question is no ;-) or that there is an 
alternative to the direction I'm looking at. I previously asked a question on 
"Adding a New Diagram type" which is cleverly not an exercise in programming, 
but rather an exercise in drawing. Much good!

I'll try to explain what I'm trying to do in terms of the electronics we used 
to do in school, a long time ago. Basically you'd have a banana connection 
which was a hole into which you could put a plug to make a connection. You'd 
end up with a circuit that looked like an old telephone operators switchboard 
desk with cables running everywhere. 

The thing about the banana connector cables was that each one, in addition to 
having the "male" connector part had another hole so that you could plug any 
amount of connectors back to back to interconnect say 5 wires together into 
one original female banana connector.

I'm being a bit long winded here but I'm trying to outline the motivation 
behind how I'm thinking. If I'm not clear you could too easily dismiss my 
ramblings ;-)

Right so I want to make a diagram of the above arrangement. I have one 
original banana female connector but I can connect an unlimited number of 
cables. I was thinking that to do this diagrammatically you could divide the 
drawing into "pages" which are more or less like the "layers" of Dia. You 
would have an overall diagram "mess" but it would be subdivided into 
"pages/layers". So one female banana might be on 5 "pages/layers" as it's 
connected to 5 different circuits. It's only shown on the master diagram once 
with a lot of interconnections but for clarity you can view just the 
"page/layer" you're interested in to figure out what you're looking at.

The big problem with the above in terms of Dia is that it is the complete 
opposite of the hierarchy of the Dia data structure when saved to file 
diagram.dia. At present the <objects> of the diagram are children of the 
<layer>. So layer one has five children objects.

<dia:layer name="Background" visible="true" active="true">
    <dia:object type="Circuit - Vertical Resistor" version="1" id="O0">
     </dia:object>
    <dia:object type="Circuit - Vertical Resistor (European)" version="1" 
id="O1">
     </dia:object>
    .
    .
    .
</dia:layer>

The way I'm talking the object is the parent and has a list of layers on which 
it can be seen:

<dia:object type="Circuit - Vertical Resistor" version="1" id="O0">
      <dia:attribute name="layers">
          <dia:layer val="background"/>
          <dia:layer val="Heating Circuit"/>
      </dia:attribute>

That is a major change in how things are done, and humans hate change. I'm new 
here so I'm not seeing the bigger picture. There is obviously a reason why 
things are the way that they are, even if I'm too green to see it. In addition 
there might well be a very good reason why what I have suggested is complete 
madness in a drawing package like Dia. 

I'd be interested in hearing the experts opinions. I've not started looking 
into the code to see how much would have to be changed. I'd imagine a fair bit 
but it's not going to effect the core of the Dia drawing code. The load and 
save routines which read and write the ".dia" files and the code for viewing 
layers. Instead of a layer having a list of visable objects the code would 
have to check all objects to see if they're on a visable layer. Slower I know 
but hopefully not too slow.

As an aside when I think of my "pages" I think a tabbed window of the pages 
might be logical. That's another days work though ;-)

Any thoughts gratefully received.