n0b3dience

First, let me thank everyone at Serif for the amazing job they've done creating Affinity Designer - you're awesome!
 
I would really love to see the addition of transformation effects - scale, shear, rotate, positional adjustment, cloning with recursive transformations, path offset, geometry manipulations, shape distortion, etc. - and, before you tell me that these requests have already been made ('cause let's face it, none of those requests are very original ideas), I'd really love to have the ability to create (and save for later use) a stack of transformation effects that can either act on an object in a specific order according to where they are placed in a hierarchy or can be independently applied where possible (kind of like the way an effects-pedal loop on a guitar amp can apply an effect to the raw, "dry" signal without it directly having an effect on or being directly affected by another effects-pedal). Then, let these transformation stacks be chained together with other transformation stacks.
 
This could be an incredibly powerful and useful tool. I'd suggest also including an option to randomize the variables for those transformations within a user-set range. If anyone else agrees or has additional ideas on this, please post a reply.

YES, YES! Please add this! For all of the gripes I have with Illustrator (and I have a lot), the Appearance Panel is something that they definitely got right - and not just for multiple strokes of varying weights, but for multiple fills with different opacities & blending modes and for fill/stroke-independent effects. When, for example, you need a semi-transparent, multiplying gradient-fill on top of a semi-transparent, screen pattern-fill on top of an opaque solid-fill to get the effect you're looking for, it can really save you a headache to need only 1 object per instance rather than 3 grouped together. Can't wait to see what you all at Serif come up with. Thanks!