I fear another meme of falsehood is starting.

Please do not take offense, but there is no evidence I'm aware of that having a lot of nodes consumes significant memory. CPU, sometimes, but not memory. The amount of memory a node takes is not proportional to how big your render is, or how many polygons it is being applied to. 

I'm referring to:

Quote - Venders seem to enjoy complicated nodes, and the results are lovely at low resolutions. But, alas, my 32bit Poser 8 does not seem to be able to reliably handle such complexity.

I think you may be conflating factors and making an incorrect conclusion. I believe that large textures will cause you trouble, but not large shaders. 

As an example, I did an experiment with a ray-marching 3D clouds shader I wrote a while back to produce procedural clouds in Poser. The shader was 1440 nodes. That's right, one thousand four hundred forty. I loaded this shader onto over 50 cloud props. So that's a total of 72 THOUSAND nodes. All of them were visible simultaneously. It rendered fine in 32-bit Poser 8. I'm sure you've never come close to that many nodes in one scene.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)