Oh, while they're at overhauling the rigging and figures they can remove the ridiculously small scaling ;).

Quote - however I would not want a system to try and second guess what I want it to do.  Having a system that prevents you from making dumb mistakes is also a system that will not let you be creative.  for instance if the shader is going to be applied to the skin a smart shader would say skin can be Tanish/Blackish/Yellowish but not Blueish/Greenish.  Which would be great if you were doing a human but not so great if you were doing the Wicked Witch of the West (who is green).

That's actually not even close to what I was suggesting. A base metal with all properties but with the ability to change color, shine, reflections, IOR, bump, displacement, etc. see Vue's presets Actually Vue has many metal presets, depending on what you wanna do. And I never at all considered it cheating.

From the Luxrender wiki:

Metal 2 in an updated version of the original metal material. It supports rendering metals using measured data as well as custom colors or textures. See LuxRender Materials Metal2 Shiny metal is a generic polished metal. See LuxRender Materials ShinyMetal Mirror is the Shiny Metal material without the polish coat, it's a quick shortcut for making mirrors. See LuxRender Materials Mirror 

Laurie