Hello, I have a workflow or work practice method. Coming from Maya Hypershade and Renderman Slim, there are shaders that can be customized and by that I mean build a network of nodes to be used as an input to a shader property like diffuse color or spec color or displacement scale. In Houdini, as I know and used, there's MantraSurface and SurfaceModel shader. Those two are highly customizable but my concerns for both are..

MantraSurface is a big network by default. It will get messier as I built custom input nodes. Using network box does do the job. But I think I'm missing a workflow idea of customizing it.

SurfaceModel, however, is clean. But, it lacks the interface.

I hope I my explanation made sense. THank you for helping.

How I see is that Mantra Surface is not meant to be customizable too much, it is more like uber shader, put it in scene, add textures, tweak settings and thats it. Mostly for users that do not want to deal with under the hood things.

For purpose of high customization you should use Surface Model, and you can build your own interface by promoting inputs, adding parameter and re-arange all that with Edit Parameter interface (Rclick on node). Also you can steal some ideas from Mantra Surface