Has anyone proposed or found a way to make a copy shader for the material room, a shader that says use the material from another material as its material. So for the vicky parts that are the same you can just set up on material then tell all the others to use that material as their material. I know you can copy the mats across all other mats but that becomes bothersome when you have say half the figure on one set of mats and the rest on another.

I'd suggest a copy of ShaderSpider -> http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=3551

What I do is just save the material to the library then appy it where needed. If its not something I'll want to keep for ever I just name it "temp".

Yeah that's what I do as well but it would be handy to just say the arms, legs etc all should just use the hip material and do this with a simply copy shader.

Not possible with nodes. Might be doable with Python magick, though. Or you could do what I do: consolidate those idiotic extra material zones into something normal.