There should be a Composite Node. This is a technique I use in all the software I write that is to be used by humans. It is like an integrated circuit. Inside, there is a shader but no surface. Outside there are just inputs and outputs. At the boundary, you connect the IO pins on the outside and the inside to other nodes.

kind of a container? open it up, pop the nodes in that do a specific job, say calculate a zebra pattern, then you just button it up with just the inputs (say colours) and the output, and that's all the user sees? I can see that working and if you were to add a password to it so the node could be locked...