Materials-based node

Hey, so I had an idea whilst editing some filters the other night: I've notice that with a lot of filters where we're trying to build something that represents some real world object, like a shield or a bug, or a wall, or a spaceship hull that we wind up making things with only a few 'materials', but very complicated ways of defining the surface color, height, reflectivity, reflection blur, metalic, channels. On several of my filters, much of the complexity is in defining the various layers of each channel for each sub-part of the item.

I was wondering if it wouldn't just be easier to simply have a node which you define the bump, spec, spec exp, metallicity, etc of particular materials. This would be a green node called 'material' and would include all the inputs the Surface Filter Result has(surface color, reflectivity, reflection blur, metalic).

You'd then have another type of node which is an aggregator / chooser between several 'material node' inputs. Sort of like multiblend: you'd have the material, and then an opacity, and they'd stack. It would have several outputs:

I know that you can build this now w/ the standard components, with big threshold stacks, but it might be an easier way to work with / think about FF.

Dunno... crazy idea