yeah, it made a lot more sense to me when bagginsbill went into the whole anti-gamma/gamma in the artistic lens thread.  i also understand why we're circumventing the diffuse node for the alt diffuse node now..  as far as i can tell, basically, if it's plain node starts off looking like you want, and you're not just using it numerically (like transparency, bump, and displacement), you need to anti correct it.  by plain, i mean doesn't respond to light.  so the weave node would need anti-correction if you think it looks fine as is.  if you don't, then it needs different correction.

think about it this way: if you started with a simple color in and didn't anti correct it, when you corrected the end product, you'd be working with a completely different color than you started with.

this is why i'd like function node.  i think it would be much easier to understand and adjust if we could just apply transformations in one node rather than 3 or more.