What I was thinking is could you use the 'Link to Layer Set' to select a different layer set for each object?

So whats the benefit of using a PSD...?

To be honest I think I will stay away from this node for the meantime. As I run maya in linux, photoshop doesn't work to well for me in wine so I think I will stay with gimp and just stick to using flattened tiffs. Beats rebooting to windows each time just to use photoshop