Dehaze inside Gradient Filter

[ButchM]

But if you want layers use PS. Why make adjustment brushes etc into layers?

That is not what I was suggesting.

[David Mantripp]

CaptureOne has layers.  Although I'm a bit surprised to say so, I think I prefer Lr's approach.  It's less fiddly.  The only advantage that C1 has is that turning layers off and on is but 1 click away. However, I preferred Aperture's approach to both (more or less any "brick", including Curves, could be duplicated and masked as a local adjustment).  But the Aperture approach needed, and never got, a bit of polish, and the underlying imaging engine fell way behind in most respects. 

[Rory]

Layers being parametric are not an issue, they already can be in PS.
But if you want layers use PS. Why make adjustment brushes etc into layers?
As for selections, part of the beauty of LR is I don't have to bother with selections for adjustments. It can do a better/faster job of selecting than I could do in PS most of the time.
An image that took ages of faffing in PS with various selections was done in a fraction of the time in LR and with far better results too.

I'm not talking about changing the way you paint the mask in LR.  I just want to be able to apply any develop setting to any mask.  There are many ways this could be implemented.  One possibility would be to have a dropdown number appear beside the local tools: 0 for the base layer and so on.  When you click on one of the local tools, such as the adjustment brush, the number representing the active layer would be incremented and you know which layer is active.  Then any changes to the mask you paint with the adjustment brush would be controlled by the same develop controls you always use - no need for another set of duplicated local controls, where adobe dribbles out additions over time.  I'm sure there is a better implementation, but this is the idea.

I understand this would require a re-architecture of the lightroom rendering engine and the UI, but I believe this would be a better fundamental design.