Great comment, thanks for making it. There's nothing like having a domain expert explain the tradeoffs using specifics.

A while back I wrote a reusable class that draws a single button using three overlapping CAGradientLayers each .5 pixels larger than the next layer drawn on top of it. With this arrangement I can then specify top and bottom values for the "outer gradient", "inner gradient" and "body gradient" producing beautiful buttons that are 100% adjustable in code. Since 80% of my skills lie in the development realm vs. the design realm this class has been insanely useful for me across multiple projects.

But obviously not efficient. If I wanted to refactor my class to still have the three levels of run-time rendered gradients along with rounded corners, what would be the most efficient method?