CAKE redraws the canvas on every frame, even if the scene hasn't changed between frames. This causes a lot of useless CPU use.

The way that the redrawOnlyWhenChanged -flag works is very manual, a better way to do it would be to store the previous frame state and compare it to the current state in the update-phase.

Using setters (defined in CanvasNode#initialize) would work for a limited set of operations (that is, changing state through assignment.) Comparing frame states would be less fragile.

Made animators and append/remove set the changed-flag, propagating flag up in handleUpdate.

If you use animators and remember to set this.changed in event listeners, everything should work ok.