in cycles it’s common practice to make your own node groups which gives you a reusable modular uber shader… you get the best of both worlds…
whether that’s a simple @fresnel" (mixing glossy, diffuse viea fresnel node or whatever…) or somthing more complicated liek a car paint or skin shader (or even a BI replication)
it’s noobish to make sweeeping statements… like uber shader’s are for noobs…
generally if i do something more than once on different materials I’ll make a group for that. If i’m sensible I’ll use a group that has the functions I need and there’s no speed penalty…
by teh way the renderman stuff only exposes the shader controls that you set it too in teh shader…
and if teh shader is written sensibly it can be combined in node groups too…
renderman is traditionally more hardcore than using nodes as you need to write a shader (used to be using rsl… not sure what RIS uses for shader definitions…
so in maya you’d be getting teh best of both worlds: pick a shder for your materials and use the sliders and controls that shader offers, make a node set and work like in cycles… or mix and match.
Nothing to see here, nothing “revolutionary” just don’t see the point of this thread…
That said a “switch” node in cycles would make node groups better… expecially one that couls activate or disable inputs on a node group…
but isn’t that moot from a performance basis these days since Brecht made unused nodes not get calculated? just a ui ledgibility issue…