The number of layers you can blend together at one point doesn’t have anything to do with the total number of layers you can have on a landscape with reasonable performance per layer. Being limited to 3-4 layers due to massive performance drops in 2017 doesn’t help anyone with developing what the engine was advertised to be capable of developing when they showcased open world tools with 4.8. Yes we all know a lot of the Kite Demo’s performance drop was just due to large textures and high tri counts, but the bigger chunk of the performance was the landscape layers.
There’s no argument though, I know if UE4 didn’t have i.e built in vertex painting and someone asked for it, he’d still face all the negativity from some people and hear suggestions about doing the vertex paint in modeling package before importing it in engine. Because that’s exactly the case with cryengine for a long time. The people who don’t benefit from the requested feature happen to think it doesn’t benefit anyone else either.