Slides vs Layers, what's your preference?

My personal thoughts:

The learner can't distinguish between slides and layers, and wouldn't care if they could. On the other hand, neither of them costs anything, but I've seen some pretty cluttered designs that look like someone was trying to cram 10 slides worth of material into one slide. It looks like they think they have to buy the slides, and don't want to pay for any more than they have to. Here are my personal thoughts of the items you mentioned.

1. Not a concern for me. If I haven't run the project from start to finish, just like the learner, I don't think I have done responsible Quality Control. So I time it in the process. Actually, if I or the learner needs to know the time, the project doesn't have enough interaction to justify the time required to publish this format. A book or movie is in order.

2. Diarmaid is right, there are other ways to pause a timeline, if somehow everything is rushing on at an artificial time frame, rather than the learner's pace. (You may think I am BIG on learner-centricity, but it's only because I want them to learn from my modules.)

4. Sometimes I want the base objects available, Other times, I cover or hide them. I don't create so many layers a day that those two clicks are going to hurt me. But as Diarmaid says, SL contains a lot of places where it would be nice to make choices that can be applied either globally, or in bulk.

5. I agree with Diarmaid. I'm fortunate not to have worked for a government entity, so I don't produce text projects that are hundreds of pages long, or ones that have six hour videos. It's a poor use of resources to pay an ID to create text or videos. If your final result is a book, give them a Kindle, or if it's a video, let them watch it on a phone. I was fortunate to work for a college, and we produced projects that the students could go through while standing in the lunch line. It may have started as a recorded two-hour lecture, but when it got to the students, it had 12 min of video, and they spent most of their time on interactions. Allen's school bus driving module comes to mind.

Again, YMMV.