Latest on the FastLED 3.1 branch:
When i’m less wracked w/insomnia, i’ll see what’s left to call this done (and start on the next list of things to do/push out for folks 
Shrubbery. It’s got to have a shrubbery.
Funny you should say that, I have a post coming up describing how to get a nice two four layer effect going 
Looking forward to your post on layering.
Thank you Daniel.
15% faster!! Pretty amazing how you’re always squeezing more performance from the hardware!
In this case it’s bringing apa102 performance closer to, say, lpd8806. The spi code is pretty well tuned to aggressively use FIFOs (and other things like continuous mode) for 24-bit output. The apa102 writing 32 bits per pixel meant I was bypassing that. I did some reordering of how the apa102 writer is doing its thing to better interleaved scaling/feeding the spi hardware, but there’s still more I can do (e.g. using continuous mode between words to shave some more clock cycles)