It can always be updated.
Hint hint.
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Karibu! 
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The basic lesson to take away, FWIW, is that “layers” in your graphics program have nothing to do with distinguishing different elements that are going to get cut/engraved on the GF. It’s all about the colors and the fills or absence thereof.
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Another reason why I like to make a distinction between the layers as they exist in the design software control, their effects in the exported design, and the Glowforge operations or steps menu. One layer with different colored objects as to strokes or fill will produce multiple operations. Five layers in the design that you broke into layers for ease of editing or for whatever reasons will come in as one operation if they all have the same stroke color (allowing that there is no fill defined.)
If there is a operation/step generated in the GFUI operations space, that will correspond to the color of an object(s). These operations do not depend upon layers in and of themselves. It is the color of the object fill or stroke that determines the number of operations. If you have two operations where you think there should be only one, then you go back to the design program and look for an object that has a different color. And remember that white fill or stroke is a color.
There are also some interesting choices that go into making sepate operations appear by default in the GFUI operations space. You can have four objects, each with the same stroke color but each with different fills. They will come in by default as cuts, but will give four separate operations. That’s interesting. If each object has the same fill and a different color stroke, defaults to four different different operations. The only way you can get one operation for several objects is to have each the same stroke color and either no fill or the same fill for each.
Also I’d like to endorse cleaning up the SVG and figuring it out how to get the design right so the operations come in the way you expect. It gives you much more versatility both for future use and for use in the Glowforge. For example, you can’t at the moment rotate a bitmap in the GFUI. That can be a constraint you want to do without.
However, there are efficiencies to be gained by doing a raster export, the most common and reasonable efficiency is to not have to remove clip paths, overlays and masques from a drawing. Just export the bitmap and all those issues go away.
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Focus on colors and fills!
Thank you all for your excellent wisdom!
Yea it is way easier to do in illustrator than inkscape unfortunately. Altho that particular image isnt bad, add a few more overlapping elements and it gets annoying
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