By pinch I mean collapse the selected layer so all the others past it shift back. Which would accomplish the same as removing a layer or two then cut&pasting all the subsequent layers back together, shifted over appropriately.

I realize the model will go off-center using a pinch, but nudging the model a few times is still faster than cut&paste for 25 layers with no screwups.

As it is, due to the confirmation dialog, deleting a layer is just easier with cut, and that makes you want to use cut, so defeats the purpose of the feature anyway.

If you wanna get really fancy, you could add an insert layer command too....