Hi Colin, yes I'm afraid that in general the "ease of use" of subd modeling tends to get rather exaggerated.

Subd tends to be quite heavy on a lot of fine tuning adjustments and point manipulations in 3D space.

Although the Silo authors have done a great job at their implementation, it is still by its nature a quite detail oriented thing and just takes a pretty substantial amount of time and especially practice before it will begin to feel more natural.

Actually the type of designs that you show there (which are very cool by the way!) are probably better to do with displacement-type brush stroke painting rather than subd vertex type modeling.

That's where you focus on painting-like brush strokes across your model, carving depressions or raising ridges with your strokes.

I believe Silo implements this as well, but ZBrush and Mudbox are different packages that are focused very much on just that style of modeling.

Possibly using MoI to model your base band shape and then exporting that into ZBrush for displacement painting might be your best approach for that type of thing.

- Michael