Hi. I have little suggestion.
Although I don’t like interface changes after 2.7, Blender 3.6 become more friendly to use, and have nice new functions which I’m discovering now.
One of them is asset browser with drag&drop support.
But problem is that standard Cycles/Eevee materials are just single materials. We can drag&drop them only to object but we can’t quickly mix two or more material. Only way to do it is to make node group. But node groups has no previews like materials.
So I think best way could be Cycles/Eeevee node “Material input” which allow to input different material output as inputs to current material then mix it with BW mask with something.
See this nice screenshot from Blender 2.79 (Internal Render).
Sometimes it was better…
What about something like it, but here (Blender 3.6)
BTW. This example is just simple example, I know I can do it with just colour mix, but imagine complex node groups with many textures etc.
