antcOneBigTreeI'm not disagreeing with you at all, but the devils in the details a bit … it'd be great if you could expand on what kinds of tasks you mean by “start working efficiently” since many of the previous posts sounded like asset prep/cleanup type workflows.
When I say cleaning up I do not even talk about cleaning up geometry. I talk about structuring the scene in a way that you can start working efficiently with the geo in the first place - quickly. I do not see any tools for that at all in Houdini.
What I mean is for example grouping similar objects, restructuring hierarchies, turning copies into instances to reduce memory footprint, renaming objects from “part_297584_cd_VX-07” to “screw_iron” 1-250 with automatic numbering and so on. So you can quickly find and isolate any piece of geometry you want to work on.
Part of this is being able to see the most important properties of an object at a glance. In max, XSI, C4D and even blender you expand the tree and you can immediately see pointgroups, subsets of components, assigned materials etc. It helps you read a scene quickly before you even start working on it. A large scene does not necessary mean large scale but often one object containing a large number of parts. Being able to manage that in one centralized interface can speed up preparing a large scene significantly.