I thought I was clear about my lack of understanding about the shader itself. What you've given in terms of your approach to building a shader is a heck of a lot more than I understood before. All I saw was a mess of nodes, so I figured that if I could recreate nodes in Matmatic, I could make some sense of them.

My exercise has one point: I now know how to create a node using code. Beyond that, I'm as clueless as ever.

I've tried it from spots, I've tried it from the imageMap. I've looked at your stuff, at face_off's, read every thread I could. No aha yet.

Gotta fix dinner. I'll put your last post next to my recipe and see if I can get it to assimilate.

The only reason that I separated the creation of the node from its application was to make an object with properties (whatever the proper term is for Python) so I could reference it again when I needed to, further down. Probably not a valid reason, but I have no idea how to do otherwise.

Starting over again. This doesn't scare me. Nothing does.

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks