It simply wasn't maintainable to store active/render vertex color layer as integer indices into the global attribute list. Making that work would've required a great deal of boilerplate that would have to be inserted in lots of places. There is simply no justification for doing that. Instead, I've coded an AttributeRef struct that simply stores a (type, name, domain) triplet to uniquely reference an attribute layer. This will be submitted as a patch for master too.