There is no longer a requirement that all the masters have exactly the same base color glyphs as the default masters. Similarly, it's no longer required that all masters' LayerLists have the same total count of layers. It is sufficient that, for a base color glyph in the default master, a non-default master may (or may not) contain one with the same name and same effective number of layers (which in turn can be laid out differently in the respective LayerLists).
This provides greater flexibility when working with variable font project with sparse glyph sets.
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