I honestly don't see the problem with layers that have boundaries that are independent from the image boundaries. Maybe it's because I learned my way around Gim

I honestly don't see the problem with layers that have boundaries that are independent from the image boundaries. Maybe it's because I learned my way around Gimp before I used any other image editor, but it makes perfect sense to me. When I crop, resize, move, ... a layer, its boundary is cropped, resized, moved, ... accordingly. What happens if you move a layer without boundaries, like in Photoshop? That's probably intuitive to people who are used to Photoshop, but not to me. What happens to contents that now fall out of the image boundary? To explain layers in raster image editors to novices, they are often compared to transparent slides. Well, layers with boundaries are simply such slides. If I move a slide, the slide moves, including its boundaries; same with other operations.