Yeah, thats what I mean, maybe we don't really disagree that much :D

And I understand you argument that its nice to know what happening under the hood, for me its more the theory behind it that interest me. For instant in the tutorial if you haven't seen it, I think the first part is very good, because he explain the theory and how it works etc. And then he moves to how he builds it with all these nodes which really don't interest me, just show me the shader if you know what i mean, and it was quite difficult to concentrate after the theory because i wanted to test it with the PhysicalSurface:D

To me and maybe Im wrong it just seems that cycles and mixing all these things together are for people that are very interested in the more technical parts and those that ain't are just interested in the end result.

But you have all these software solutions today that can paint these maps for you all in one go and you just hook them up, so they help move the workload from the technical side towards the more artistic side or what to say.

This is from Substance painter which i use and its a base shader that you can then modify etc. and once you are done you are left with X amount of maps that you can just plugin to the PBR node that you use, that being Iray, Superfly whatever.

To me this looks very nice as a starting point and its easy to hook up and so on. Now if you should make the same one using cycles, wouldn't you end up needing these maps anyway and still have to add and mix all the things together to get the correct shader?

And these programs are not exactly unpayable, Substance painter cost 150$ 3D-coat is 99$ so to me it just seems like a lot of problems and headache having to go through these cycles setup compared to doing it in these programs and make a setup that a non technical person can understand....but again as I said, I don't really think i understand the benefits of the CyclesSurface node, because you can still use all the cycle nodes with the physicalSurface node.