It just now dawns on me that you want 3 different types of ‘identifiers’. One is the check mark in the Current column (with bold typeface in the Name column), the second one is the existing color-across-all-columns marking that at the moment doesn’t really do anything - it just happens to be on the layer that you last touched. On top of that you request a third identification that would somehow highlight the layer(s) that selected object(s) are on.
The existing system where a field in the status bar reports the Current layer when no objects are selected and the object layer when a selection is made fails to provide the requested functionality because (1) the field does not display long and/or nested layer names completely and (2) it says Varies when objects on different layers are selected.
So far so good. I agree that it would be beneficial to be able to quickly see what layer an object is on.
But then you write:
More specifically:
As I select an object, to see the layer immediately and turn it off is what I want
Turning that layer off involves clicking on the light bulb icon in the layer row, which in turn will move ‘Identifier nr 2’ to this layer, again making you lose your allocation layer. How would you solve that?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Remember, it’s very easy to request a feature and you might even have a pretty good idea how it would work. Implementation something else entirely. The devil is in the details …
Personally I don’t use the blue highlight of a row in the layer dialog so I would be OK with using that to indicate selected items.