Those color-coded vertical lines represent triggers. I am not sure how things were done back in the 16-bit era ( or even now for that matter ) when constructing 2D shoot-em-up level editors, but this seems to be a pretty intuitive way to me. I figure this system, and some random bits throw in should more than suffice.
Still have a handful of menial things to wrap up. Aiming to finish up the trigger stuff, and there are another set of classes I forgot about ( to implement things like parallax, solid tiles etc... ).