It looks similar to a collapsed gramplet but has different behavior and controls. So that adds another memorization to the learning curve. (In the capture below, the Name cloud gramplet was collapsed and relabeled “Dashborderly”).
However the similarity could be leveraged. Make it an actual gramplet and more intuitive rather than less so.
For instance, when the + is clicked it could expand to a short (150px or so) GUI for managing Named layouts: renaming, deleting, adding, changing layouts. Integrating the Column count control for each Layer row. Maybe with a quickview report context menu for each row. Which pops up a list of Gramplets in that layout with their plugin registration description and linked to the registered help-url. Eventually, evolve to have a Save/Load for sharing layouts. Or where a saved “recommended layout” could be attached to an Addon set and which appears in the list of named Dashboards if that Addon is installed.
Yes. None of them thrilled me either. I was hoping to prime the pump for others to say “those ideas were no good. How about…”