So what you say is true for the first download, but afterwards allthe base layers of wf + jdk + ... are present. With strippinginto 1 layer there is no chance of caching.Situation of course changes when the base layer is updated.
Right, good point, I was optimizing more for the very first download, when people want to try it on their boxes or put the image id in the openshift and spin the h-services as fast as possible. While layers are useful in the long tern or when you have multiple containers based on the same image or the same image with multiple versions. But if squashing everything into one layer can actually make the image smaller, then there must be something strange happening like the 1st layer creating X and the 2nd layer removing X. In our case it's probably the wildfly image creating the standalone wildfly server while the h-services actually replacing it with our wf server + h-services.
jk