For example, turning a cube into an RBD object using the shelf hides a bunch of actions from the user. That's nice, but I want to be able to automate certain things..

I don't think Houdini uses Python in all its actions like maya does with mel so it would be hard to mimic this behavior. On the other hand shelf tools are just python scripts what you can easily study (see install\houdini\scripts\python. RBDObject Shelf tool calls doptoolutils.py for example.).

And finally echo can help a bit but at the end you can always figure out what to do both in python and hscript.

See opscript command for example…
but even that is not necessary. I've never felt this need to see what Houdini does as it's so clear in “object oriented” sense.
opadd, opparm opetc…


cheers,
sy.