Salesforce Minimum Access Profile & Page Layout Assignment Error

Salesforce 's direction on security is go with permission sets and ditch profiles (well, almost!). See this link:

There is a Salesforce Lab free tool to convert your profiles to permission sets. More on this later!

In summary, the direction is to user Minimum User - Salesforce profile and use permission sets additively to provide access to your users.

While we were using this approach and doing some testing logged in as a user with Minimum Access profile + permission sets like Read & Update on Accounts, none of the Account fields and related lists were showing on the page layout.

My first instinct was to check Sharing Settings for Org Wide Defaults and it was Public Read Only. Then I went to permission sets assigned to this user and they have Read, Edit on Accounts. Still scratching my head!! Then I checked page layout assignments. That's when I realized the issue:

I am not sure if its Salesforce really really locking it down by not even assigning a default page layout to this profile. But, do take care to set this in your implementation if you plan to use Minimum Access profile. So, testing, troubleshooting and fixing such issues becomes very crucial.

About security in general, this is a major overhaul and a lot of organizations that have been using profiles will need a lot of assistance to move to permission sets as outlined in the article I shared earlier.