Maybe it's out there and I've just missed it, but I really wish there were richer ways to build up a container FS than just the usual layers approach with sets of invocations to get from one layer to the next, especially when it's common to see invocations that mean totally different things depending on when they're run (eg "apt update") and then special cache-busting steps like printing the current time.
I know part of this is just using a better package manager like nix, but I feel like on the docker side you could do interesting stuff like independently run steps A, B, and C against some base image X, and then create a container that's the FS of X+A+B+C, even though the original source containers were X+A, X+B, and X+C.
It looks like the layer limitation comes from the underlying union filesystem stuff and not from anything inherent in Docker itself. I wonder if it would be possible to build a new filesystem driver for Docker that could serve up an infinite ecosystem of immutable nix packages without having to actually unpack them. Whether such a thing would actually be of value would probably depend a lot on the use case, but I could imagine a CI type scenario where you wanted to have a shared binary cache and individual nodes able to come up very fast without having to unpack the pkgs and prepare a full rootfs each time.
As a side note: I’m somewhat bewildered by the docker-controlled-by-kubelet-on-systemd architectures as there is huge overlap in what these layers do and how they are implemented.