True, there is more control. I will admit that terragen is rather limited with it's own surface textures. Terragen 2 has perlins, voronoi and additional turbulent noise but these are all dedicated to terrains but what is nice about vue is a larger variety of noises. I think that diving into the nodal system that vue has is were the solution is and just not mearly the basic material editor.  

In fact as i was discovering the "granite" is very good for tiny noise.    :)

Thank you for the suggestions.   :)