I'm **thinking** that I want three levels of layouts: one level for the application, one level for each controller, and a third for each action.
You want both a *layout* and a *view* for each action? I'm not sure that makes much sense to me... why not just merge it all into the view?
As for having a layout per controller, you could have a single master layout that contained a call such as:
render :partial => "layouts/#{@controller_name}"
or some such...