Quote - If you have an example of how you used them to achieve a better subdivided result for the spout in this case, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Not tryin to compete with your results, mate, just saying I might have done it a different way.  Cutting in triangular edges for the spout made sense to me.  I tried it in Cinema for laughs, and didn't see any issues, but it did require some extra geometry to get the same creasing.  So in the end, your method was probably a better technique, but the idea that triangles are bad to use in subdivision is most often a myth.  Ngons are the real enemy of catmull-clark style subdivision, not tris.  We might even get away with ngons using doo-sabin subdivision, but I don't know of an application which supports it, because it's not useful for organic modelling.