+1 for effects, like drop-shadow. This will be a big feature that I am looking forward to!

Re: if I would like to have two UI layers -- with the bottom layer blurred (i.e. like a modal dialog) -- is it reasonable to have two game objects that each have a camera and Noesis view? I can then apply a blur post-processing effect to the bottom view. What do you think -- is this reasonable or am I inviting trouble with regard to performance?

If I have two layers which layer receives click events first? Is it based on camera depth (this would make sense to me) or order in hierarchy? I'm finding button click events are obscured by buttons that exist on the lower layer. i.e. (layer 10 buttons steal events from layer 11 buttons).

Re: above -- here is a video showing the behavior. You can't see it but I am left clicking furiously on the button. https://bit.ly/2u4S1ax (85MB). Once the cursor moves off a UI element that should be obscured by the the element higher on z-index (based on depth order of camera and views) you can see the event fires. The reason I use two views is that the bottom one often has blur effects applied via a post-process shader. I do this when a modal dialog appears.

I don't want to distract from the last question -- which is a pretty big obstacle for me right now. I just saw that you asked for a screenshot showing off the two layers with post-processing applied to the bottom layer for blur. Here it is:

On the bottom layer (NoesisView) -- throwing up a top-level grid and setting enabled to false as a work-around does not work. Although the buttons are disabled (you can see the trigger to a disabled state) they still steal mouse down events. :(

Yes, two different cameras with independent Noesis views. I did this to accomplish the blur effect shown above. But as you can see in the video above, click events for the top layer are somehow obscured by the bottom layer. I tried changing order in the Unity hierarchy and also tried changing camera render order.