NullAllocationError

It's mildly annoying to be unable to control the stroke pressure exactly in Affinity Designer; wanting to somewhat align how thick the stroke is on two objects along a certain point is pretty much impossible. However, I've realized that there's a preexisting design paradigm for controlling properties of objects that exist within shapes but which have their own node points: that of the controls used for gradients by the Fill tool.
As such, I'd like to suggest that, either via the stroke options in the context toolbar or as a tool in the regular toolbar, there should be a way to control the stroke pressure of a shape with a node-based system, operating as follows:
With this tool active, each selected curve or other shape has a line surrounding it, representing the stroke's path. This line has nodes along it, each setting what the stroke pressure should be at that point along the line; this is shown as the width of the node's square shape perpendicular to the line, and can be adjusted either by placing one's mouse just to the side of the node and "pulling" on the symbol that pops up or by clicking on the node and manually typing in a value for the stroke pressure. By default, curves have just a start and an end node, which for closed curves is represented as a "fused" node, where half the node is the start-size and half the node is the end size; an arrow symbol might also be useful for matching this to the existing stroke pressure control system. As for how this works with shapes that have an inner portion cut out or distinct shapes that have been combined via the add operation, I feel that if a shape contains multiple distinct stroke portions, those should be controllable separately (admittedly, this is functionality Affinity doesn't yet offer even via the already-extent stroke pressure control method), and thus should have their own line with nodes.

Simply put, an option that lets you designate a layer to be prioritized for snapping to (ignoring non-prioritized shapes close to the area where you're trying to snap if there are prioritized shapes there); I imagine it as simple right-click options accessible while mousing over the layers panel: for layers that haven't been designated for snapping, it'd give the option to make them one of the layers to snap to, while for layers that have already been designated, the right-click prompt would be to no longer prioritize them for snapping. An additional button next to the general snapping on/off button would let you reset the list of layers to prioritize snapping to entirely, effectively turning it off until you redesignate a layer as a priority for snapping.
This'd solve some of the issues I've had where due to several shapes being close together (for example due to shading layers on top of the layers they're shading) Designer fussed back-and-forth over which of two other shapes it'd try to snap to, completely refusing to snap to the shape I was actually trying to snap something to.

No, I specifically want to avoid a compound; I mentioned the issues I have with using Subtract for this (alters the appearance of shapes with the 3d effect applied to them, gets finicky with layer ordering and grouping) in my original post. What I'm looking for is effectively a way to create an inverted version of a mask.
 
That being said, I ended up finding the solution I was looking for: the Erase blendmode.

I was wondering if it's possible to, when adding a point to a series of curves, align the placement of the new point so that while it snaps on the nearest preexisting line of the shape, it keeps either the horizontal or vertical position of a previously-made point.
While I'm aware this can be done manually after placing them, I'm curious if there's a way to do so while placing the points, since symmetrically adding points to a shape (so that I can adjust the angle of an endpoint without changing the angles in the rest of the shape) is pretty common in my workflow.
 
[EDIT]: I seem to be cursed to be unable to find the solutions to questions while searching or pressing/hovering over buttons until after having posted about it. The Snap option to "align to curves of selected nodes" accomplishes exactly this.

I have attempted to download the trial version of Affinity Designer, but (and this holds no matter whether I download the newest version or an old version of it (and yes, I have made sure to clean the previous download out when I try to reinstall it), or even Photo instead of Designer), I get a message to the effect of "The program or feature [address in my temporary appdata that features AffinitySetup as one folder name] cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows." from my computer, alongside "Failed to start setup. Please contact technical support." from the program itself. Now, to my understanding, Affinity is only available for 64-bit systems, so this is a bit odd. Any thoughts with regards to how I can resolve this?
 
EDIT: Never mind, turned out it was the ".NET 3.5 being active" issue, and I simply hadn't turned it off right.

I have attempted to download the trial version of Affinity Designer, but (and this holds no matter whether I download the newest version or an old version of it (and yes, I have made sure to clean the previous download out when I try to reinstall it), or even Photo instead of Designer), I get a message to the effect of "The program or feature [address in my temporary appdata that features AffinitySetup as one folder name] cannot start or run due to incompatibility with 64-bit versions of Windows." from my computer, alongside "Failed to start setup. Please contact technical support." from the program itself. Now, to my understanding, Affinity is only available for 64-bit systems, so this is a bit odd. Any thoughts with regards to how I can resolve this?
 
EDIT: Never mind, turned out it was the ".NET 3.5 being active" issue, and I simply hadn't turned it off right.